Naturally, people start to ask: if a military invasion of Taiwan is what China has long planned for, isn’t this the perfect timing for it? Why would China waste this golden opportunity?

In this essay, I will explain to you why this won’t happen.

I understand Taiwan is an emotionally charged topic for many people. Some of you will not like my conclusions. So first, I want to clarify my role here.

I am not here to pass normative judgments about which side is right or wrong. My role is that of an analyst. I see many people, some of whom are my clients and many of whom have stakes on the table, are concerned about the situation in Taiwan right now. They deserve clarity on this issue and a level-headed analysis with some predictive value. That’s what I try to provide here.

As early as 3 weeks ago, I predicted the war in Iran was not going to end soon. And now I want to share with you this other high-conviction assessment of mine.

Recap of Part 1

If you have already read Part 1, you can skip this part. If you haven’t, here is a quick recap.

In Part 1, I laid out two fundamentally different perceptions of Beijing's core policy formula on Taiwan, namely, “We strive for peaceful reunification, but we do not promise to give up use of force.”

From an American (and, to a large extent, Western) perspective, the main focus of this formula is the “use of force”. “Reunification” ranks second, but China’s expansion won’t limit itself there. It’s just the first step of a global expansionary ambition. “Peace” is just a cover-up phrase.

From China’s perspective, though, the order of emphasis is entirely different. The first and foremost thing is “reunification”, a daily obsession of the People’s Republic of China since its founding. (It was also the daily obsession of Taiwan before Chiang Kai-shek passed away.) After it, “peace” ranks second. A peaceful reunification is much preferred to war. I concluded that the US far underestimates China’s obsession with reunification, as well as its desire for a peaceful reunification.

To set the broader context, I took some time to explain why there was this obsession. My explanation is from a pragmatic perspective. The core argument is that Taiwan is at the heart of the PRC’s founding myth, that without it the country will fall apart, and that the Party itself will lose its mandate to rule. Therefore, the whole Taiwan Question is existential for China, not just a piece of land that Beijing can bargain away for something else.

Whatever you believe about which side is right in this great conundrum, this “existentiality” of Taiwan from the perspective of Beijing sits there like a rock. Any serious analyst of the situation can’t look away from it.

Again, please go to Part 1 for a more fleshed-out argument.

Peaceful reunification: the pull factors

So now we understand that Taiwan is existential for China, shouldn’t China jump on this great opportunity to attack Taiwan and finish the deed once and for all?

No.

If there is only one key conclusion you could take away from this essay, it’s this:

China, ultimately, needs a peaceful reunification.

Peaceful reunification is both preferred and increasingly likely.

Time is on China’s side.

There are at least three reasons supporting this conclusion: there is an economic one, a cultural and political one, and a final part about Xi’s own vision for his legacy.

The economic argument is obvious. A seaborne invasion of a big, mountainous island armed like a porcupine is extremely difficult. If China succeeds quickly, international sanctions and disruptions to external trade links will cause significant pain to China’s economy. If China can’t deliver a quick win, it will also become an economic disaster that could potentially dial back all the progress we have made since the reform and opening-up era. covered this topic quite comprehensively in their essay Why China Won’t Invade Taiwan.

The cultural reason is more squishy, and it’s difficult to explain it well to people who have never had real experience dealing with the Chinese. But I will try.

You may well remember that in my rebuttal to Noah Smith, I laid out my key observation: China is not an “insecure-expansionist” power like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union, so war and aggression have no popularity here as solutions to big problems. I also explored why history and geography have shaped China into a generally peace-loving culture.

A few weeks ago, a TV drama called Swords into Plowshares (太平年, literally “The Peaceful Years”) became an unlikely success in China. The show covered a historical period in China that even most Chinese people knew little about: The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–979 AD), a chaotic 7 decades between the fall of the Tang Dynasty and the rise of the Song Dynasty.

It was a dark period marked by great political turmoil, murders, famine, and even cannibalism1, when might was right, when emperors died like flies, and when dynasties rose and fell every few years. It was also a period when rules and order broke down completely, and whoever controlled the armies claimed the throne.

In short, it was about a historical period that stands in total contrast to everything modern-day China represents.

The show began in the middle of this historical period and ended with its final chapter: a famous moment when the Kingdom of Wu Yue, which mostly occupied present-day Zhejiang, Shanghai, and southern Jiangsu, surrendered its territories to the Song Dynasty, and the country was finally reunified, peacefully.

To be sure, there is quite a big dose of pseudo-history in this show, too. The show made it seem as if surrendering to central authorities for the sake of national unity had always been the King of Wu Yue's eventual goal. The actual historical truth, however, involved far more coercion than was portrayed.

But still, the overall contours of history were respected, and it was true that no lives were lost when the Song Emperor put today’s Zhejiang and Shanghai under his fold.

The political analogy in this show is subtle but hard to escape for most Chinese viewers. One especially interesting scene was towards the end of the show, when the Song emperor discussed the strategy with his generals.

He asked General A: “How many men do you think you need to conquer Wu Yue?”

General A: “400,000 men.” (This is a huge number in that era.)

He then asked General B, who is more junior to General A: “What do you think?”

General B: “I need 300,000 men.”

Emperor: “Oh, so General B is somehow more capable than General A?”

General A: “300,000 men is possible, but it will be a war that will leave the land of Wu Yue in total ruins.”

The emperor fell silent with visible pains in his face.

You see, what’s interesting about a Chinese TV drama that you can’t find in American dramas is that this one not only has no problem of using an epic peace, not an epic battle, as a way to wrap up a big show, but also takes the pains to show you the deliberations about the lengths those characters go to in order to avoid violence.

This show is just one of the many soft reflections of China's national character. To add more hard data to this, I want to cite a very good report from the China Pulse survey by Emory University, the Carter Center, and : (Emphasis mine)

In the July-August 2025 wave of this survey, a small majority (51%) of the Chinese public agreed Taiwan should not be unified by military force under any circumstances (29% disagreed). In the October-January wave, there was no majority opinion (38% agree vs. 45% disagree).

Should Taiwan declare de jure independence from the mainland, the Chinese public supports limited military operations on offshore islands (81%) and economic sanctions (62%) as a response over a full-scale military attack (32%).

Twice as many Chinese people agree the use of military force will only make the Taiwan issue worse (50%) than disagree (24%).

These results are similar to my own reading of the situation. An unprovoked war over the Strait of Taiwan will be deeply unpopular.

Ironically, while an American president can start an unpopular war as he likes, China’s top leader needs to read the room much more carefully before launching one. This is because China’s system is delicate, even brittle, and the deep internal imbalances caused by external military adventures have led the country to implode again and again.

Peaceful reunification: the push factor

While these economic, cultural, and political factors serve as the great “pull effect”, they can still be unsatisfactory for skeptics. After all, many of you still hold the view that it’s all up to Xi Jinping himself.

If Xi Dada is determined to take down Taiwan one way or another, for a man who has sufficiently proven his resolve and willpower to the world, he will find ways to bypass all these restraints. And if that’s true, the best moment to take action is indeed right now. With just one signature from him, the People’s Liberation Army, an organization largely insulated from the rest of the population, will jump on this opportunity to sail across the narrow strait in one swoop.

Except, there is also a strong push effect here, a big incentive for him not to plunge into a war.

It’s about what he sees as his own legacy.

I think by now, very few people disagree that Xi is someone with a keen sense of mission, whether you like his mission or not. So what’s his mission? I can’t guarantee I know everything about this, because I can only gather information from public sources about his past words and deeds.

What I am very certain of is that his mission is deeply intertwined with this country's cultural impulses. In other words, it’s impossible for him to set his life’s mission for the Chinese nation as something entirely alien to what the Chinese nation considers to be right. (This statement is actually tautologically correct.)

If China is a country that has chosen to disdain violence, how would a Chinese leader want to be remembered? It will not be hard to conclude that their loftiest dream is to be remembered as someone who oversees unity, prosperity, and peace.

Here, the cultural factor is no longer just a pull factor, but also a push factor, hard-wired into the decision-making algorithms of Chinese leaders.

In such a context, a peaceful reunification carries far more prestige than a military invasion can ever achieve, and will go down in China’s 3,000-year history as one of the greatest feats of all time.

Honestly, which Chinese leader can refuse this enticing possibility?

To put it in some pseudo-quantitative way, imagine there are 3 outcomes for Xi. One is a peaceful reunification, one is a reunification through bloodshed, and the last one is no reunification.

A “no reunification” is 0. A peaceful reunification is a 100. A reunification, albeit through war, is probably only at the 20-30 mark. It’s better than “no reunification”, but it’s a huge downgrade from the other option. It’s not an easy choice to make, and will always be the painful last-resort choice

So why is PLA preparing for combat?

If the argument is that China prefers peace, how do we explain the frantic pace of its military modernization? From the rapid commissioning of naval vessels to the expansion of its nuclear arsenal and Xi’s frequent, televised orders for the PLA to be “ready to fight and win”, the optics suggest a nation on a war footing.

Analysts often point to the “Davidson Window”, the 2021 assessment by US Admiral Phil Davidson that China might attempt a military takeover of Taiwan by 2027, as a definitive invasion deadline.

No, I am only playing with you here. Davidson actually only said that China would be combat-ready by 2027, but many people already jumped to the conclusion that it’s a countdown to war. (The Wall Street Journal even had a whole report about this misconception.)

There is a massive strategic gulf between having the capability to win a war and having the intent to start one. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War famously argues that “the subjection of the enemy’s army without fighting is the pinnacle of excellence.” To achieve a peaceful reunification, Beijing must first eliminate the “military option” for its adversaries.

A deadline for combat readiness is thus a prerequisite for peace. It is only when the PLA can demonstrate a 100% certainty of victory, and a corresponding 100% certainty of defeat for any intervening force, that war can be avoided. By building a military that makes the cost of resistance unthinkable, Beijing believes it can finally bring the modern-day “Kingdom of Wu Yue” to the table without firing a single shot.

In fact, if war were the final goal, then hiding strength and biding one's time rather than showcasing daily military progress would be the better strategy for winning. After all, subterfuge is the key to military success. Eisenhower never told Hitler his forces would land in Normandy. Putin lied for many months before the war that he would not attack Ukraine.

Does Xi have to finish the job within his lifetime?

It is true that early in his tenure, Xi Jinping famously stated that the Taiwan question “cannot be passed on from generation to generation.” Many observers have latched onto this phrase as a ticking clock, interpreting it as a personal vow that he must achieve reunification before he leaves office or passes away.

However, this is a narrow and likely incorrect reading of his intent. While Xi certainly wants to move toward a solution, there is a massive difference between “not waiting forever” and “forcing a conclusion at any cost.”

If the price of reunification is the wreckage of the Chinese economy and the derailment of China’s “Great Rejuvenation”, I highly doubt Xi would bang his head against that wall to achieve it. As former top CIA China analyst Chris Johnson argued in his essay, the idea that Xi is driven by a desperate “legacy obsession” to seize Taiwan regardless of the risks lacks firm evidence. For a leader who views himself as the steward of China’s return to global preeminence, a reckless gamble that leaves the nation wide open to a high risk of self-implosion is the ultimate bitter pill I doubt he will ever want to swallow.

Interestingly, my own high-conviction assessment of this timing also closely aligns with the recent consensus within the U.S. intelligence community. In the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, the US ODNI concluded that Beijing is not currently planning a military invasion. While I often find myself at odds with Washington’s broader narratives, on this specific point of tactical restraint, the analysts at Langley and I are reading the same room.

Xi is a man of resolve, but he is also a pragmatic calculator of risk. To him, “not passing the problem down” means building the overwhelming strength that makes reunification inevitable, not launching a desperate crusade to meet an imaginary deadline.

How and when?

To understand how this ends, we must first accept an uncomfortable, fundamental truth: the “Taiwan Question” has never been a bilateral issue between Beijing and Taipei. It is, and always has been, a function of the U.S.-China relationship.

Historically, the US has been the primary variable in this equation. In the 1950s, when the US all but gave up on Chiang Kai-shek, the Korean War broke out, leading Truman to save the KMT’s Taiwan from certain defeat. In the 1990s, U.S. carrier groups again intervened to maintain the status quo.

But the reverse logic is also simple: if it becomes clear that the United States is no longer willing or able to defend the island, the question will be solved almost instantly.

Will Washington defend Taiwan? There are both push and pull factors for the US, too.

The current disaster in Iran serves as a sobering data point for Washington’s “pull factors.” If the U.S. military is struggling to secure the Strait of Hormuz against a regional power like Iran, the prospect of defending Taiwan against a China that is a hundred times more powerful than the IRGC becomes strategically daunting.

However, there is also a significant “push factor” keeping the U.S. tethered to Taiwan: semiconductors. In a recent poll of my American subscribers, 68% cited TSMC and chip supply as their No. 1 concern regarding Taiwan, accounting for more than half of their “Taiwan mind share”. This is understandable. For NASDAQ and the broader U.S. economy, Taiwan is essentially a single point of failure.

Interestingly, this creates a profound asymmetry of needs. If I were to poll the Chinese public, I suspect chips would occupy less than 5% of their own “Taiwan mind share”. As I explained in Part 1, to Beijing, Taiwan is an existential matter of national sovereignty; to Washington, however, it is mostly a matter of supply chain security.

This asymmetry is exactly where the opening for peace lies.

In any negotiation, when one party wants “A” (sovereignty) and the other wants “B” (uninterrupted silicon), there is room for a bargain. The critical deadline for peaceful reunification, therefore, is not a military one, but an industrial one: the maturity of domestic U.S. semiconductor foundries.

Once the CHIPS Act projects reach full capacity and the U.S. feels it has achieved semiconductor independence, the strategic necessity of defending Taiwan evaporates. At that point, for the US, the liability of a potential war will outweigh the benefit of the island’s autonomy, and we will see the gears of negotiation begin to turn.

This also explains why Beijing’s reaction to Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi’s recent comments was so fierce. Some called it irrational, but Beijing was actually dead rational. By suggesting that a Taiwan contingency is an “existential crisis” for Japan, Takaichi threatens to transform a manageable U.S.-China negotiation into a much more volatile China-Japan confrontation. For Beijing, involving Japan, a country toward which the Chinese public holds deep historical grievances (unlike the attitude towards the US), raises the stakes from a cold strategic bargain to a hot emotional conflict. It puts the “30-score” scenario of a destructive war back on the table.

Make no mistake: war is not a zero-percent chance. Conflict will occur if China ever feels truly vulnerable, if Beijing concludes that all peaceful avenues are closed, and if a painful, “low-score” reunification is the only way to prevent the total collapse of its own founding myth.

But as long as the path to a high-prestige, peaceful settlement remains open, time remains on China’s side.

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[85% of this article is written with human hands, 15% are written by AI after I dictate the outline]

(The full version can be found here.)

The situation in Iran has dominated the news headlines for the past few weeks. Naturally, even though China is a distant party to this conflict (as Hegseth himself confirmed), many people still try to link it to China.

First, there is the claim that China stands to hurt the most from this war. I dealt with this quite easily in this tweet.

And then there is the outcry about why China has done nothing to defend Iran, supposedly an ally of China (No, they are not allies.)

At the time of writing this piece, Trump even threatened to cancel the upcoming Xi-Trump meeting if China doesn’t offer help.

China, China, China! But isn’t this war mainly about Iran, Israel, and the US?

The most egregious narrative, however, belongs to the idea that China would exploit this opportunity to take action against Taiwan.

If this is true, the likelihood of that can only grow more intensely after Iran effectively closes the Hormuz, and after it becomes increasingly likely that the US would be mired in an endless war in the Middle East again.

When the US is shipping THAAD away from Asia and sending marines from Okinawa to the Persian Gulf, and when there are now substantive questions regarding whether the US military can actually protect its own allies and sustain a long war against even a second-rate power, what better timing than now to resolve the Taiwan Question once and for all?

And yet China is doing nothing, and we are kept waiting.

At this point, I should point out that the idea that “because the US is busy elsewhere, China will take the chance to attack Taiwan” reveals the true lack of understanding about the entire matter.

I have long wanted to lay out my view about the Taiwan Question comprehensively, so I figure perhaps this is the right moment, especially given what the US has just done against Iran, a sovereign state at the opposite end of the world, is stacked against what Beijing is NOT doing against an island it has always claimed to be its own, but never moves a finger yet.

And not just the question in the title. I will also use my own mental framework set up in this essay to answer questions, including:

• Why is Beijing so angry about Takaichi’s comment about Taiwan?

• Is the Davidson window real? In other words, is there really a 2027 deadline for a military invasion?

A tale of two mental frameworks

I will start with a review of Beijing’s official stance.

Beijing’s perspective on Taiwan has been quite consistent. It considers Taiwan to be a runaway province, a remnant of the last civil war, and a remaining relic of past humiliations. It has always treated the Taiwan Question as a domestic issue and set recognition of the so-called “One China Principle” as the prerequisite for commencing any diplomatic relationship.

Concurrently, Beijing has consistently and openly treated reunification as its ultimate strategic goal. Its exact formula to achieve that can be best summarized by this oft-cited statement:

我们争取和平统一，但是不承诺放弃使用武力

We strive for peaceful reunification, but we do not promise to give up use of force.

Here is what I find interesting about this statement: there are 3 key phrases: peace, reunification, and the use of force. But at some point, I realize that these 3 phraes carry entirely different weights to different people’s ears.

This is how a typical Chinese mind will rank the 3 by level of importance:

1) Reunification > 2) Peace > 3) Use of force

Now this is how a typical American mind will rank the 3:

3) Use of force > 1) Reunification > 2) Peace

You see, they are ordered entirely differently!

For a typical American mind, it assumes that sooner or later, China is going to use force against Taiwan. And not just Taiwan. It’s only Stage 1. After Taiwan, China will enter a stage of global military expansion. Peace? It’s the least important. Might well be a cover-up phrase for Beijing’s true intentions!

This is, at least, what Washington would do if it sees something as its strategic objective. If sending some missiles and drones to kill somebody can achieve some goal, fine, they will do it.

This is not what an average Chinese mind thinks, however. For the average Chinese mind, the thinking goes as something like this: the first and foremost issue is the reunification itself. But we really want to achieve it with minimal bloodshed. We prefer peace much, much more than war. Yet, we can’t give up on the use of force as our last resort. If we give up on the “stick”, our “carrots” alone will never achieve our top priority: the reunification itself.

These two entirely different modes of thinking are at the core of the misunderstandings about the Taiwan Question. My observation is that the US, overall, far underestimates China’s obsession with reunification, underestimates China’s willingness to reunify peacefully, and overestimates China’s preference for fighting wars, and not least because the US often tries to use its own mirror to understand China’s motives.

If you have completely followed me by now, I congratulate you. You don’t have to read the rest of this essay.

If you still find this to be unconvincing, though, now is the time for a deeper dive.

Why the obsession with reunification?

The first thing we need to know is that China is absolutely obsessed with making sure Taiwan is part of China. No matter whether you agree with China on this or not, this very obsession itself is a given. No amount of strategic calculation can ignore the existence of this obsession.

But why so obsessed?

There can be many reasons. I can imagine Beijing citing the history of past humiliations, memories of the old civil war, and shared language and heritage. You might also already be tired of the phrase “自古以来 from ancient times”.

But none of them are that relevant for you, the reader, the armchair geo-strategist ruminating on the future of the world.

There is, however, a single reason for the obsession: Taiwan is already at the core of the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China. Without it, China will crumble.

What is China, anyway? Like any country in the world, it’s a shared imagination. It’s a story that people keep telling each other, and all of these rounds of storytelling make a “country” a reality, and make people of the same country willing to live under the same roof and to follow the same rules.

For the US, this story is about the Mayflower, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, and the Statue of Liberty. Without those stories, the US has no reason to exist as a single body. Everyone might just pledge loyalty to Texas or California.

In contemporary China, the fundamental story is about the struggle to keep the country strong and prosperous, to protect its people from bullying by foreign powers and internal warlords, and to prevent disintegration into chaotic fragments once more.

“Not an inch of land lost” is the non-subtle promise the governing party has made to the governed since the founding of the PRC, the current iteration of China, as part of the same policy package aimed at keeping the country “real” and ensuring the governing party stays in power.

That “not an inch of land” is in relation to the map the Party has drawn for its citizens from the very beginning, and it’s true that so far it has made good this Great Promise. It has successfully and peacefully reclaimed Hong Kong and Macao and settled most of its border disputes with neighboring nations.

And now, Taiwan remains the last major obstacle to achieving this Great Promise.

What would happen if Taiwan were to become permanently and irrevocably independent, and Beijing did nothing about it? Beijing would have broken this Great Promise. And with that, it would lose the mandate to rule. Soon, its rule will collapse, and very soon the country will fall apart and descend into a new cycle of chaos.

This is as serious as it will get, because, once again, what’s more to a country other than the story it keeps telling itself? If you break that story, and make people realize it’s just a story, the people will question why they are in the same country after all. They will question whether everything is just a gigantic lie. They will question what they have signed up for in the very beginning. China, in its current form, won’t survive these questions and will only lead to significant human trauma before it settles into a new equilibrium in the indefinite future.

I guess you now arrive at the gist of this section: The Taiwan Question is not only about Taiwan itself. It is, fundamentally, also an issue about China. And it’s not just any single issue for China. It’s not a trivial piece of land that Beijing can just give up or be bargained away in exchange for something else. It’s an issue of life-and-death proportions. It’s about the survival of the Communist Party of China as well as the “China” in its current configuration.

This is why, when Xi got the opportunity to spell out China’s 4 red lines, the Taiwan Question sits at the very top of this top list. Xi is literally suggesting this is the most important issue for China, outranking anything else.

This is also why I often smile at the idea that the fate of Taiwan should be left to the choice of the 23 million people living on that island. For the record, I am a big fan of democratic choice, and I believe Taiwanese people should have a voice here. But I think, to be really fair, if we were to hold a referendum on it, we should also involve the 1.4 billion people living on the mainland. It’s not fair to exclude them from voting on an issue of life-and-death for themselves.

The cynics among you may argue: why only Taiwan? Why not Mongolia? Why not Vladivostok and hundreds of square kilometers of land lost to Russia just over a hundred years ago?

To be honest, I don't have an intellectually satisfying answer to these questions other than, “Well, they drew the map this way in the beginning. Now that the map is hardened into the national consciousness, they are only prepared to stake their political survival on this map”.

For the rest, they have already chosen to forget about them. They can be flexible when they have to, but where they can’t, they won’t.

Read the rest of this essay here:

China Translated

With US trapped in Iran, why is China wasting a golden opportunity to attack Taiwan? (Full version)

The US is getting bogged down in a disaster in Iran right now, and despite Trump’s many lies, the war doesn’t seem to end anytime soon…

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a month ago · 90 likes · 29 comments · Robert Wu

He was not a famous person, but he was remembered by friends and relatives for many intellectual legends.

Born in rural Zhejiang in the 1930s, he was soon found to be a child prodigy. One of his uncles sponsored his education in the county high school. Yet, unfortunately, he had to terminate his studies because his school was bombed in the war.

Not a quitter, going back to the same rural town that our ancestors had lived in for over a thousand years, he taught himself the whole curriculum and became a teacher. What’s more amazing is that he taught math, Chinese literature, and Chinese history to students from grade 1 all the way to high school seniors.

I never understood how he managed to do that. It’s as if he were already an AI-enhanced superhuman, except that ChatGPT happened a year after he left our world.

And as one of the extremely few members of his generation in rural China who knew how to use a computer, one of his daily routines in the last decade of his life was spending hours a day playing Sudoku online. It was said that his anonymous account was often ranked highly in some global leaderboard for that game.

We often wonder what kind of achievement grandpa could have made had he been born in a different era, and his studies were not interrupted by wars, and he went on to study in Hangzhou, in Beijing, or perhaps in the United States, just like folks like Yang Chen-Ning of his era.

Grandpa was not a talkative person. When he spoke, he spoke with a thick Shaoxing-style Wu accent, so that I could hardly understand him. Furthermore, living mostly with my parents in Nanjing, I didn’t spend much quality time with him as I grew up. All of these made him this legend-type of person in my memory, and sadly made him more of a mystery even for me.

One thing I do know about him is that he dedicated his twilight years to revising a book of genealogy of our clan. I knew from my parents that it was a huge endeavor. But it was only until the last few days, during the Spring Festival holiday, when I finally opened its pages that I had an understanding of its magnitude.

The book, as revised by a committee headed by my grandpa, spanned 38 generations all the way to the year 779, in the middle of the Tang Dynasty. This revision, the 15th revision in history, was nothing short of a miracle.

I won’t bore you with the actual family tree. But in this post, I have translated 4 interesting articles that I found in this treasure trove.

The first one is the preface written by my grandpa, detailing how the original Book was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, grandpa’s personal journey about how the revision came about, and what many challenges they faced during the endeavor.

The second one is about how a pivotal 1947 edition was re-discovered, miraculously and literally through a dream, and the third one recounts how this same edition was salvaged from certain destruction during the Cultural Revolution. It’s all but certain that if they hadn’t found this 1947 edition, my grandpa would not have been able to finish this project before he passed away.

The last one was one of the more ancient accounts written and added to the book by ancestors. They read like a history book, written in classical Chinese. This particular one that I referenced here recounted how their little town suffered during the horrendous Taiping Rebellion, the Chinese civil war in the 1850s and 60s that claimed the lives of millions.

The motivation for this translation is two-fold.

First, I want to showcase to you this side of China, about what many of our older generation treasure at heart, a glimpse into their spiritual world.

Reading about how those lively characters - my grandpa who vowed that he would dedicate his life to this project, Mr. Chuanjia who kneeled before the long-lost 1947 edition and wept with joy - reminds me that, contrary to my own perception, many Chinese people are also faithful. It’s just that the exact nature of faith may be different from other versions.

The second motivation, of course, is to remember my own late grandpa. The private, silent, reclusive old genius who taught the child me math and Chinese history lessons. The eternal stranger that I would never be able to direct my questions to.

Yet, reading his own words, written in his life’s project for both his ancestors and for posterity, left me with an understanding of him that I never had before: a man of passion who finally found his calling.

I miss you, Grandpa.

And I hope you enjoy his work.

#1 Preface to the 15th Revision of the Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy

By Wu Shiquan, 38th Generation Descendant, Editor-in-Chief of the 15th Revision March 2010

The Seed of a Dream

In the spring of 2001, while spending the Lunar New Year at my son’s home in Nanjing, our family of five took a weekend trip to Meicun Town in Wuxi. We went to seek the ancient lands of the Wu State and to pay our respects to the enduring legacy of our ancestor, Taibo. Since I was a young child, my father had told me that the birthplace of the Wu surname was Meili (modern-day Meicun). That seed of “seeking one’s roots” was planted in my heart long ago; this journey was the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

Upon arriving at Meicun and entering the Taibo Temple, we paid homage in the Zhide Main Hall. There stands the seated statue of Taibo, the founding ancestor of the Wu clan, wearing a ceremonial crown and royal robes, his feet in red ritual shoes—a figure of dignity and kindness. We moved on to admire the statues of the twenty-four kings of the Wu State and their loyal ministers in the east and west wings before strolling through the temple grounds.

By chance, we came upon the office of the “General Genealogy of the Chinese Wu Clan” committee, then located within the temple. We were warmly received by kinsmen currently working on the records. During our conversation, one kinsman searched the catalog of the Shanghai Library’s Genealogy Department for me. He discovered they held a copy of the Tangpu1 Wu Clan Genealogy. I was overjoyed; the thought of reviving our family lineage took hold of me instantly. I immediately asked my son to visit the library the next time he was in Shanghai.

However, the result was disappointing. The Shanghai collection was a 1916 edition (the Year of Bingchen), but it consisted of only two volumes. It was insufficient for a full reconstruction. We returned empty-handed.

The Bitter Search

To revive a genealogy, one must trace back to the source and clarify the branches of the lineage; this is impossible without an “old record” to serve as a blueprint.

For someone like me, who had never been involved in such work, the old records were essential as a template to follow. In short, trying to rebuild a genealogy without the original records is like building a castle in the air—pure fantasy.

Yet, knowing the Shanghai Library held a fragment, I felt certain that a full copy must exist somewhere in Tangpu or its neighboring areas. Armed with a sincere heart and the conviction that the records could be found, I began a long and arduous search.

The journey was bitter and frustrating. Clues appeared from time to time, but they were all “flowers in a mirror or the moon in the water”—illusions that vanished as soon as I pursued them.

By 2008, my investigation revealed a tragic history: the last time the Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy had been revised was in 1947, shortly after the victory against Japanese aggression. The work began as the smoke of war was still clearing and was hastily concluded in 1948 amidst the booming cannons of the Civil War.

That edition was ill-fated.

Almost as soon as it was finished, legal disputes over entries led to a lawsuit. The records were eventually declared void by public notice. Aside from a few private copies and some public records, the rest were sealed in the ancestral temple.

During the early years of the Cultural Revolution, the hall was demolished to build a public assembly hall. The records were moved to a private home, and a few volumes were scattered. When the “Smash the Four Olds” campaign swept the nation, the remaining books were seized. Viewed as “feudal dross,” they were left in a local office to rot. Eventually, a flood soaked the building, and the records were destroyed entirely.

As for the private copies held by branches that had moved away, they were either confiscated or quietly destroyed by families fearing political persecution.

We knew that one public copy had been entrusted to a veteran for safekeeping after the revolution. He survived the political movements, and the records remained with him until after the Cultural Revolution. Sadly, he lived a lonely life with no heirs. After his passing, his nephew cleared out his belongings; he took the furniture of value and burned everything else—including the Book.

My hopes vanished in those rising flames. After eight years of searching, I had not seen a single page of our history.

The dream seemed to have turned to ash.

A Turn of Fortune

At the end of 2008, a kinsman named Chuanjia reached out to me, enthusiastically offering his support and a willingness to search together. This reignited my passion. We searched Tangpu and its surrounding areas again and expanded our scope to the libraries and archives of Shaoxing and Shangyu, but the result was the same: nothing.

Then, just as we felt we had reached a dead end, light appeared. One evening in July 2009, Chuanjia and his son, Jianbo, came to my house beaming with joy. As soon as they entered, they shouted: “The genealogy is found!”

I was so stunned I couldn’t react. Jianbo explained: “It’s in the Zhejiang Library. I found it online.”

I asked him to pull it up on the computer. Sure enough, the website displayed: “Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy, 1916 Xiaosi Hall Woodblock Edition, 36 volumes in 24 books, held by Zhejiang Library.”

Truly, it was a case of “searching for her a thousand times in the crowd, only to turn around and find her there in the fading lantern light.”

I was overwhelmed with emotion. Nearly a century had passed since that edition was printed. I knew that revising the records now would be unimaginably difficult, but I also knew that if we did not do it now, the difficulty would only grow with time until it became impossible. The Tangpu Wu clan would lose its history; we would become trees without roots and water without a source. I vowed then and there:

I will spend the rest of my life completing this genealogy, to honor our ancestors and to leave a legacy for our descendants.

The news spread like wildfire. Supporters gathered, a committee of founders was formed, and the 15th revision of the Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy officially began.

Immense Challenges

This was the first time the Book of Genealogy was to be revised since the founding of the People’s Republic, and the difficulties ahead were easy to imagine. From the very outset, we were confronted by three major hurdles; had even one of these remained unresolved, the entire project likely would have been abandoned halfway.

Challenge I: The Shift in Mindset

The first great hurdle was a shift in perception. Specifically, was reviving the genealogy even necessary?

The Tangpu Wu clan has a venerable tradition of record-keeping. From the late Tang Dynasty, when we shared records with the Zhoushan and Zhuji branches, to the early Ming Dynasty, when we began our own independent registry, we have been diligent. In the 229 years between the reign of Emperor Kangxi (1718) and the Republican era (1947), the genealogy was revised eleven times, averaging once every twenty-two years. These records served as the sinew of our clan, a tangible bond of kinship that compelled each generation to continue the work.

However, after the 1949 Revolution, a “philosophy of struggle” was championed—one that claimed “there is boundless joy in struggling against others.” This ideology eroded the very foundations of family affection. This peaked during the unprecedented Cultural Revolution, which utterly subverted the traditional virtues of honoring one’s ancestors and harmonizing with one’s kin. Relatives were treated as strangers, or worse, as bitter enemies.

As we began our work, we were met with a constant barrage of skepticism and reproach: “The Cultural Revolution destroyed all the family trees; why bother now?” or “What use is a genealogy in this day and age?” Had we ignored these voices, the project would have stalled. To raise awareness, we issued a “Letter to Our Kinsmen,” widely promoting the idea that documenting our lineage in this era of prosperity is an act of remembrance and a means to reunify the family. We argued that family genealogies, alongside national history and local gazetteers, are the three pillars that support the historical edifice of the Chinese nation. They are cultural heritages highly valued by the state, and the ultra-leftist excesses of the Cultural Revolution must be corrected to set things right.

[redacted]

The second point of contention was the methodology of the revision itself. The focal point of the disagreement was whether daughters should be included in the genealogy. Historically, under the feudal patriarchal system, only males could inherit the family line—a practice that clearly discriminates against women and stands in direct contradiction to our modern Constitution and national policy.

Consequently, we explicitly proposed that only-child daughters and their children (both grandsons and granddaughters) be permitted to carry on the lineage (indicated by a “red line” in the pedigree charts). While this move comforted families with only one daughter, it drew fierce opposition from others: “Historically, only sons get the red line. If daughters can have it too, what kind of genealogy is this?” Some sons-in-law also worried: “If my children are registered in the Wu Clan records, what happens when my own family revises its genealogy?”

With only-daughter households making up nearly half of our families, the project could not proceed without dispelling these prejudices. In our “Second Letter to Kinsmen,” we argued the legitimacy of including daughters from the perspectives of law, national policy, and biological bloodlines. We clarified that a genealogy is not a government household register; a person is not restricted to appearing in only one family’s records. By presenting facts and reasoning, the controversy was finally settled. Not only did these families participate with confidence, but they also donated generously—of the nine households that donated over 10,000 RMB, three were families with only daughters.

Challenge II: Tracing the Ancestral Source

The second major difficulty was tracing ancestral origins. If a clan member cannot find their ancestor in the existing records, they cannot “link” to the lineage, making the revision impossible.

Initially, we worked from the 1916 edition, which was 94 years old. Even an infant recorded in that edition would be 95 today; effectively, not a single person currently alive appeared in those books. To find a link, one needed the names, zodiac signs, spouses, and burial details of deceased fathers, grandfathers, or even great-great-grandfathers who were born before 1916.

This forced us to add an extra step to the process: a comprehensive ancestral investigation. But, while we found matches for many, some kinsmen knew nothing of their ancestors beyond one or two names. Searching for a match in over twenty volumes was like looking for a needle in a haystack. We could neither ignore them nor manufacture a false connection, leaving us in a total deadlock.

Fortunately, a 1947 edition was discovered in the Village of Wujialou shortly after. This closed the gap by 31 years and finally solved the puzzle. (We owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Mr. Bingcan for preserving this record; his story is detailed in a separate entry in Volume Hai).

[Robert: You can find this fascinating story in Articles #2 and #3]

Challenge III: Securing Funds

The costs of such an undertaking are high. Since genealogical revision is a private, grassroots activity, no government funding is available. Given the economic circumstances of the Tangpu Wu clan, no single individual could shoulder the cost alone, and a “per-head” tax would have been insufficient and met with resistance.

We took a different path: voluntary sponsorship with symbolic rewards. We encouraged the successful to give more, allowed those in financial difficulty to give nothing, and asked everyone else to contribute what they could. This proved effective, eventually raising over 300,000 RMB.

We are deeply grateful for this generosity and have treated every cent with the utmost care. Aside from small stipends for those doing door-to-door registration and data entry, all members of the two committees served as volunteers without pay. As a result, we raised enough not only to finish the genealogy but also to allocate half the funds toward rebuilding the Wu Clan Ancestral Hall. To date, the main structure—the Hall of Ancestors—has been completed. This serves as both a comfort to the spirits of our ancestors and a token of gratitude to all who donated.

[Redacted]

#2 How the pivotal 1947 edition was found, literally by a dream

The Dream That Saved Our History

Following the opening ceremony, we worked on two parallel tracks: the door-to-door collection of modern family data and the painstaking search for our ancestral roots. While the data collection went smoothly, the search for our origins was repeatedly thwarted.

The reason was clear: we were relying on the 1916 edition of the Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy. A century of separation is a vast chasm to bridge. Every time we hit a dead end, a collective sigh would ripple through the committee: “If only we had the 1947 edition... all these problems would vanish.” This became a mantra for everyone involved, especially for Mr.Zhigang, who was assisting me in the search.

As the saying goes, “What you think of by day, you dream of by night.”

Late on the night of October 4th, after an exhausting day of work, Zhigang drifted into a deep sleep. In his dream, he saw a mountain of genealogies in the distance. He rushed forward and grabbed one in his hands, only for it to vanish into thin air. Just as he was overcome with frustration, a mysterious voice whispered to him: “The records you need are in the village of Wujialou!” He woke with a start, realizing it was but a dream.

A Leap of Faith

The next morning, Zhigang couldn’t shake the dream. He thought to himself: Better to believe it might be true than to dismiss it. He knew there was a branch of our clan in the village of Wujialou, and a visit there was already on our schedule. However, because it was “just a dream,” he didn’t dare tell anyone for fear of being ridiculed.

After breakfast, he drove alone to Wujialou. With a mix of hope and doubt, he began visiting kinsmen and spreading news of the project. Eventually, local clansmen led him to the home of a respected elder, Bingcan.

Bingcan had long hoped for a revival of our family records. Without a moment’s hesitation, he brought out his most precious treasure: the 1947 edition of the Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy, which he had hidden for decades and had never told anyone about. When Zhigang saw the words “Wu Clan Genealogy” inscribed on the wooden chest, he realized his dream had manifested into reality. Overcome with emotion, he dropped to his knees and bowed deeply in reverence.

This display of sincerity deeply moved Bingcan and the onlookers. When Zhigang asked to borrow the records for the committee, Bingcan immediately agreed. Beside himself with joy, Zhigang called our office to report the news. It was nearly noon, and the entire committee was waiting breathlessly for his call.

#3 How the pivotal 1947 edition was saved from destruction

The Secret Guardian of Wujialou

Exhilarating news arrived on the morning of October 5th: the 1947 edition of the Tangpu Wu Clan Genealogy—a set we had spent years searching for to no avail—had been discovered in the tiny mountain village of Wujialou.

The set consisted of twenty-six volumes. Three had been lost to history (held as court evidence in the former Zhejiang High People’s Court due to an old lawsuit), but the remaining twenty-three were largely intact, save for some minor damage from silverfish. After decades of political upheaval and natural disasters, these volumes were the “lone survivors” of a shattered legacy. The man responsible for saving these precious texts was Bingcan, a descendant of the Fusao branch.

An Unlikely Protector

Bingcan was a 36th-generation descendant of our ancestor Wenjian. Since the early days of rural credit cooperatives in 1958, he had worked at the Haoba Credit Union, eventually serving as its director from 1964 until his retirement. He was a man of integrity—down-to-earth, sincere, and widely respected. This public standing provided the “outer shield” that allowed the records to survive in his hands. But more importantly, it was his inner conviction—his deep understanding that a genealogy is the soul of a family—that drove him to act.

The records had originally been kept by a branch leader named Guijin. However, after the 1949 Revolution, Guijin was classified as an “Upper-Middle Peasant.” In that era of radical leftist politics, he realized he was powerless to protect the books and handed them to Chun-yue, a kinsman from a “Poor and Lower-Middle Peasant” background, hoping the political classification would act as a safeguard.

During the “Four Cleansings” movement in 1964, a government work team seized the records to search for political evidence. After the team left, the books were returned, but they were treated with total neglect.

Rescuing History from Playgrounds

Bingcan watched this decline with a heavy heart. He remembered a time when generations before him treated the genealogy as a sacred object, kept in multiple layers of silk and hidden away. In the old days, opening the records was a ritual: one had to wash their hands, change clothes, and burn incense as if visiting the ancestors in person. Now, seeing them cast aside was a desecration. Yet, given the social climate of the time, Bingcan didn’t dare act rashly.

The breaking point came when he saw local schoolchildren, ignorant of what the books were, using the ancient pages as scrap paper for doodling and scribbling. He knew that if he didn’t act, the history of our clan would be wiped out.

Risking everything, Bingcan leveraged his local prestige and his devotion to his ancestors to literally “rescue” the volumes from the children’s hands. Once he got them home, he commissioned a custom camphor wood chest to fit the dimensions of the books, painted it, and carefully inscribed “Wu Clan Genealogy” on the front. He then hid the chest, keeping its existence a secret from everyone.

This happened during the early, most volatile years of the Cultural Revolution. To commit such an “act of righteousness” in that suffocating atmosphere required extraordinary courage and vision.

Not only did Bingcan save the books, but he also became a self-appointed historian; from 1947 onward, he kept a small notebook where he recorded every birth, death, marriage, and burial within his branch, significantly simplifying our work today.

The Missing Link Found

When Bingcan learned that we were officially revising the genealogy, he did not hesitate to offer his cherished collection to the committee. The impact was immediate: Those who previously couldn’t find their ancestors were linked instantly; Doubts regarding “best-guess” connections were resolved with hard evidence; Rare errors where families had linked to the wrong branch were corrected in time.

The role this 1947 edition played in ensuring the quality and speed of our project cannot be overstated. The merit of Bingcan, who guarded these books through the darkest times, is indelible. His name shall be recorded in this genealogy so that he is never forgotten.

#4 An account about the Taiping Rebellion

Original title: 粤匪扰害记A Record of the Disturbance by the Canton Rebels

Since our sage and enlightened Emperors founded this dynasty, the world has long been governed with benevolence. For over two hundred years, the people shared in the blessings of peace. However, during the Daoguang and Xianfeng eras, natural disasters struck repeatedly. Solar eclipses and earthquakes occurred; rivers overflowed, and mountains crumbled. A comet appeared in the sky, trailing like a long bolt of white silk. The strange and ominous portents of that time were too many to recount.

Following these signs, bandits from Guangdong [the Taiping Army] rose up in swarms; they were known as the “Longhairs.” In the autumn of the year Xinyou (1861), they suddenly overran Shaoxing, and the people’s livelihoods were plunged into misery.

Our Wu clan of Tangpu, having previously received imperial decrees to recruit local militia, had prepared for such a crisis. When the rebel forces arrived to plunder our town, we stood our ground and fought them in several battles, both large and small. But alas, we were outnumbered, and our food supplies failed. We held out until the autumn of the year Renxu (1862), when our defenses were finally shattered. Our town was reduced to scorched earth.

In the slaughter that followed, some died as martyrs for the cause, while others chose death over surrender. Our women refused to be defiled; even as they were being beheaded, they chose to remain as ghosts of their home soil rather than suffer dishonor. Some were taken captive, while others scattered to the winds. The old and the young fled for their lives, many perishing in exile—becoming lonely souls wandering in foreign lands. Alas! This was the will of Heaven; what more can be said?

By the immense grace of the Emperor, General Jiang Yili was commanded to lead the land and naval forces. Since breaking the enemy at Quzhou, he cleared the entire province of Zhejiang in less than a year. This allowed our people to return to their ancestral lands, rebuild their homes, and reunite with kin to recount the sorrows of their separation. We have gathered the bleached bones of the fallen and laid them to rest in the snowy mountains.

Ultimately, it was the will of Heaven that restored stability to the state, but it was the exertion of men that suppressed the rebels. As subjects, we shall forever be grateful for the kindness of our Sovereign. Thus, we can say that the will of Heaven, the efforts of man, and the grace of the Emperor are all bathed in the magnificent fortune of the Son of Heaven.

We also rely on the devoted service of our generals. Now, as we undertake the revision of our family genealogy, we specially record these events to honor the fallen and clarify our history. Let future generations read this and remember.

Date: The seventh year of the Tongzhi Reign of the Great Qing (1868).

In 2025, that assumption finally collapsed. Trump’s handling of the trade war and Ukraine didn’t just spook allies. It forced a long-delayed thought into the open: what if the system’s guarantor is no longer reliable or predictable?

People didn’t say it out loud. They just bought metal.

Gold, silver, platinum, and copper rallied from one all-time high to another, and with no end in sight. It was a clear vote of no confidence on an epic historic scale.

This is one strange thing about 2025: events of genuinely historic magnitude kept happening — and then immediately disappeared. Social-media cycles were so compressed, turbo-charged by the proliferation of AI-generated content, that our minds barely had time to register before attention moved on to the next short video.

The United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Say that sentence slowly. A few years ago, this would have been considered an extinction-level escalation scenario in many risk models. In 2025, it happened — and then it passed. It was an enormous gamble, and Trump, to his credit, won this gamble spectacularly. Iran backed down. Oil did not spike above $120 a barrel. But what exactly did he win? Peace? Or proof that peace now depends on preemptive bombing followed by social-media amnesia?

Then there was the India-Pakistan conflict, with two nuclear powers, engaging in what may have been the largest aerial dogfights since World War II. Another event that should have permanently reshaped perceptions, yet barely stayed in the global consciousness for more than a week.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was another moment that should have lingered longer than it did. Many people saw him as one of the last public figures who genuinely believed talking to the other side was not a form of treason. He is now dead. His death marked not just political violence, but the further erosion of the idea that dialogue itself is safe. American polarisation crossed into a darker phase.

Polarisation showed up economically as well. 2025 was the year the U.S. economy visibly bifurcated. One half of it was AI. The other was everything else. Capital, talent, chips and electricity flooded into the race toward AGI, turning AI into the single pillar supporting economic growth and equity markets. At the same time, much of Main Street felt increasingly strained. Long-duration interest rates stayed stubbornly high despite Fed cuts — an ominous signal for the rest of the economy untouched by the love of AI.

But even for AI, we already start to hear nervous chatter about a bubble. Yet, this is the last engine of American growth. It will not stop. It must not stop. The cost of shutting it down would be unbearable. The music has to keep playing.

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Doubts about America’s future would not have felt so sharp if they had been offset by disappointment with China. But disappointing, in 2025, China clearly is not.

If 2025 was the year the myth of American exceptionalism finally cracked, it was also the year China decisively broke free from the doom and gloom narratives that had dominated the past few years.

What was striking was not just the reversal, but how fast it flipped. Barely a year ago, China was “uninvestable.” Empty investment conference seats. Sliding equities. Endless variations of the same story: China is peaking. China is collapsing. China is Japan. China is entering “an age of malaise”, poetically claimed by Evan Osnos, long-time China correspondent of The New Yorker.

Perhaps the best personification of this extreme pessimism is none other than my favorite , who pounded at the table and screamed:

China at the Peak! (July 2023)

Will China squander its moment in the sun? (Jan 2024)

(Read my rebuttal to him here)

Then suddenly the script flipped. “A great reckoning.” Dan Wang’s Breakneck became a phenomenal success and, for the first time in living memory, made China a mirror for the US intellectual elites to review itself. A flood of near-identical YouTube thumbnails and Twitter threads: I visited China and was shocked, as if written from the same template.

Admiration quickly morphed into panic. China isn’t just doing well, the story went — China is eating the world. China is too capable. China is unfair. China is making trade impossible.

The turning point had names. It started with DeepSeek and a frenzied few days in late January, causing Nvidia to lose $600 billion in value in the biggest one-day loss in human history, forever killing the previously ironclad assumption that the AI gap between the U.S. and China was vast and unbridgeable. It wasn’t.

The India-Pakistan conflict delivered another unintended demonstration effect. For the first time in history, the world saw Chinese weaponry perform in real combat conditions, and it’s not even the most advanced systems in its arsenal.

In the meantime, China’s surge in biotech was set to replicate its success in EVs and is on track to dominate the world, again. This, along with the stories of China-made diamonds, China-made wine, and even China-made caviar and foie gras, shows that this current wave of China possesses an unstoppable, all-encompassing nature.

And there is even more. The success stories of Nezha 2, Black Myth: Wukong, POP Mart, Rednote, and even luxury goods show the world that this wave of success isn’t just confined to the material world, but also manifests itself in the world of soft powers and intangibles, where China was long believed to be bad at.

At this stage, it seems only high-end chips and top talents are the US’s two remaining edges over China. But the first one appears on track to be over soon, while for the second one, Trump was busy self-sabotaging with visa restrictions and tighter anti-immigrant policies.

Then there was the trade war. Contrary to expectations, China did not panic. No theatrical escalation. No desperate concessions for Western applause. Just patience, timing and textbook game theory. Watching it unfold felt less like geopolitics and more like a Tai Chi demonstration against a furious heavyweight boxer. Every swing was met — not head-on, but sideways. The boxer thought he’d scored a knockout, then noticed he couldn’t breathe.

(I have to thank Trump and his trade war here, which made me one of the very few China-based authors writing for The New York Times, which is quite an amazing personal experience this year.)

Why did the U.S. miscalculate? At its core, it’s the hubris and self-complacency. A misguided belief in its permanent supremacy, which, in part, stems from what I dubbed “ideological monotony” last year. Just as the same belief has blinded the DC establishment and globalist elites to the woes of ordinary masses, it has also driven the Trumpists to the epic miscalculation that the US still has unmatched leverage.

And why didn’t China cave in? Because it had been preparing. A year ago, China’s emphasis on security over growth was mocked by commentators who saw it as an overreaction or ideological rigidity. Noah Smith attributed China’s peaking to China’s leadership, which wouldn’t give up “their obsession with control.” Wei Lingling claimed that “Xi’s tight control hampers stronger response to China’s slowdown.”

In 2025, the laughter stopped. It turned out that years of self-sufficiency efforts, redundancy building, and belt-tightening mattered. If not for these measures, China could have easily buckled when the real pressure arrived. What was deemed stupid suddenly looks far-sighted.

By the end of this confrontation, a de facto G2 world had taken shape. The U.S. has finally realised it misjudged the balance. In Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief terms, it has already moved past denial and anger, and now drifts somewhere between bargaining and depression, edging slowly toward acceptance. The empire is not yet collapsing, but it is clearly retreating. At home, it is consolidating and re-industrialising. Abroad, it is quietly disentangling from peripherals like Europe and Japan, while staying muscular in its own backyard, to Venezuela and Cuba.

China, however, is not free of risk. As external pressure eases, it may finally gain the strategic space to confront deep internal imbalances. If left unresolved, economic discontent will find a way of mutating into something darker, more grotesque, from both ends of the political spectrum.

Fortunately, we are witnessing clear signals in that direction. If China can pull this off again, we might have peace and prosperity for several generations at least.

With that said, I wish all of you a fruitful, exciting, and happy 2026!

2025 in pictures:

On the far left, a movie review of Youth (芳华) - a fairly unremarkable 2017 film about a military performance troupe set in the 1970s and 1980s - suddenly went viral on domestic video platform Bilibili, at least for a few days.

Youth was never meant to be a grand historical statement. It’s the kind of movie you watch once, feel a vague sense of nostalgia, and then move on. This time, however, the film was taken out of the grave and radically reinterpreted. A popular Bilibili reviewer reframed it as a hidden ode to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Not a tragedy. Not a warning. An ode.

The claim itself is almost comical. I won’t waste your time by going into details of this movie. But what I can tell is that, if anything, the movie can only be described as something to criticize and reflect on that era. Moreover, both Feng Xiaogang, the director, and Yan Geling, the author of the original novel, are commonly known as harsh critics of the Cultural Revolution.

So this claim is about as credible as arguing that The Godfather or Zootopia is secretly praising the Cultural Revolution. In fact, under the same logic, any story reflecting some elements of class difference, injustice, or social stratification can be reverse-engineered into Maoist revolutionary nostalgia.

And yet, the video worked.

Partly because the influencer is genuinely good at storytelling, the review racked up tens of millions of views in just a few days before it was eventually taken down. On Bilibili, viewers can send so-called “bullet chats”—comments that fly across the screen as others watch the same segment. I was told this video accumulated more than 300,000 bullet chats, enough to completely drown out the actual film if you turned them on.

Many of those bullet chats repeated the same slogan: “Long live the people.”

In this worldview, the Cultural Revolution was a righteous uprising of the proletariat smashing entrenched elites. Mao was a misunderstood hero, smeared by later narratives, whose true intentions are now being rediscovered by a new generation.

This interpretation sits in direct conflict with the official Chinese position, which describes the Cultural Revolution as a catastrophic mistake—an “apocalypse” that destroyed institutions, cultural heritage, and lives. This contradiction alone made the video politically radioactive.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, another ideology, once fringe, is moving closer to the mainstream. It is often referred to as 皇汉, or Han ethnonationalism.

A focal point of this worldview is a radical re-evaluation of Qing dynasty history, summarized by what its proponents call the “1644 historical viewpoint.” The argument is stark: true Chinese civilization ended with the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. What followed was a Manchu conquest—an ethnic minority subjugating the Han majority. The Manchus committed atrocities, governed incompetently, and ultimately weakened China so badly that it made the Chinese nation miss the Industrial Revolution and endured more than a century of humiliation.

Had the Ming survived, the argument goes, China might have industrialized on its own and never would have had this humiliation.

Needless to say, this directly contradicts the official CPC narrative of Zhonghua minzu—a unified Chinese people composed of 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, including Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, Miao, and others. In the official framework, Qing history is not a foreign occupation but an integral part of a continuous, multi-ethnic civilization.

The official crackdown on this was swift. One of the most popular accounts advocating the “1644 historical viewpoint” has been shut down, while the state apparatus appears to be so alarmed that it has already issued several high-profile takes attacking it. To have a sense of the severity of the official pushback, you can take a look at an article translated by , a Substack affiliated with Xinhua.

How to make sense of this

Despite standing at opposite ideological poles, these two schools of extreme thought share several striking similarities.

Both narratives mix some elements of truth with distortion. In both cases, these elements of truth are lifted out of historical proportion and reorganized into simplistic moral frameworks.

Yes, Manchus did commit atrocities during the invasion of China Proper. But the Manchu may be the most sinicized ethnic dynasty throughout Chinese history, whose leaders spoke Mandarin and wrote in Chinese, and deeply respected the Chinese way of life. By the end of the Qing, the difference between a Manchu person and any other Chinese person was almost entirely unintelligible. Also, are we really sure that, had it been the Ming, not the Qing, who had met with the Western powers at the sunset phase of its dynastic cycle, we really could have done much better?

Moreover, what Han-nationalists always conveniently forget to mention is that had it not been for the Qing, China’s territory would not have been as large as it is today. It was the Qing Dynasty that first allowed China to effectively control Tibet, the Northeast (Manchuria), and a large part of Mongolia. And if not for the Qing, a political power hailing from China Proper would not have regained Xinjiang after 1000 years of losing it following the An Lushan Rebellion. If Manchus were not “Chinese”, what about those regions? Should we split China into pieces now if we really want to be fundamentalist about it?

As for the Cultural Revolution, yes, it did involve genuine elements of class struggle and strong anti-establishment sentiment (which many people today didn’t know about; they just knew it was “bad”). But the modern-day champions of cultural revolution once more always forget to mention that it was also, at the very core, a great power struggle of Chairman Mao against his many perceived political rivals. (It’s just that, unlike typical tyrants, he used the mass movement and chaos as opposed to guns and poisons to achieve this end.) And in the ensuing chaos, the evil of people found its way out, destroying lives, both corporeal lives and mental existence. There was no revolutionary romance about it at all.

At this point, it is also imperative to mention that both narratives also thrive in the blind spots of official narratives. Some topics—such as ethnic relations—are forced down into people’s minds in rigid, slogan-like terms, without ever being put up for debate. Others—most notably the Cultural Revolution—are acknowledged and then sealed off, with little room for sustained public discourse. As a result, even educated audiences often lack a deep, nuanced understanding of these issues.

When discourse is absent, fragments of truth become dangerously persuasive. Partial facts, stripped of context, can feel revelatory. When people know nothing about the nature of the Cultural Revolution, beyond the mere fact that it is “bad”, then anyone who reveals the anti-establishment side of it and claims it to be “good” will immediately gain immense credibility.

I also remember this vulnerability personally. When I was fifteen and first learned about Tiananmen Square, you could have told me almost anything bad about the CPC, and I would have believed it—not because I was stupid, but because silence creates an intellectual vacuum.

Finally, both movements feed on anxiety, especially among young people. Economic pressure, social immobility, and a sense of lost direction make grand explanatory narratives emotionally attractive. They don’t just interpret history; they assign blame and offer clarity. This is the same psychological terrain behind the silencing of figures like Zhang Xuefeng and Hu Chenfeng that I commented on in October.

Which brings us to the real irony: The emergence of these extreme narratives is, in large part, the by-product of the censorship regime itself.

If certain histories cannot be openly discussed, if official narratives leave no room for questioning or reinterpretation, then alternative explanations will inevitably fill the gap. Crackdowns may remove the most visible expressions, but they do not address the conditions that produced them. In fact, suppression often strengthens the sense that something important is being hidden and will inevitably resurface, leaving the official machinery in perpetual cycles of whac-a-mole.

Today, these views are still not mainstream. But history rarely turns on what people believe today. It turns on what accumulates quietly over years and decades. More importantly, the socio-economic conditions that underpin their emergence can only worsen in the foreseeable future.

If extremism grows in the shadow of silence, while no organic counter-narratives are nurtured, who would have the power and credibility to contain it if one day, for whatever reason, when that whac-a-mole machine no longer functions?

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It has been my delight to answer Simone’s questions, which are always sharp, sensible and empathetic. So when Simone asked me for this Q&A for his upcoming book, I gladly accepted.

Simone is an Italian journalist specialising in Asia and China, where he lived for many years. Simone’s new book attempts to explain how China has viewed and continues to view the United States through a reverse timeline, starting today and tracing back to the US travels of Liang Qichao and Wu Tingfang. It seeks to understand how the official narratives mix with the perspectives of Chinese experts on China, businessmen, the first students who went to China, and the first Chinese travellers to the US. The book will be available in all Italian bookstores (publication date April 2026) and on the website of the publishing house Mondadori, Italy’s leading publisher. Simone’s previous book, “2100, How Asia Will Be, How We Will Be,” was a finalist for the Strega Prize, Italy’s most important award for non-fiction.

Q&A: A Chinese Perspective on the United States

Simone: In your view, what do Chinese people think of the United States? How has the sentiment toward the US changed over the last 10–15 years?

Robert: I’ve previously written that there are at least “two Chinas.” About 10% of the population comprises urbanites or a more liberal-leaning China, while the vast majority, around 90%, could be described as “traditionalists”. Their views of the US differ significantly and have also evolved over time.

The traditionalist China views the US quite consistently, in my observation. They see it as the world’s number one superpower but believe it consistently intends to keep China in check. A commonly cited saying encapsulates this sentiment: “帝国主义亡我之心不死The imperialist desire to exterminate us is not dead.” They are the same regular folks you may see on the streets, the cab drivers you chat with, who will always be quite friendly to individual Americans, but negative about the role of the US government.

The more liberal-leaning China, the part of China you will most likely have a deep conversation with, once held a very different view, but this has changed dramatically over the past 10 to 15 years. Around 15 years ago, this group, including myself, had an overwhelmingly positive view of the US, seeing it as a shining example of all that is good in the world, often overlooking its internal imbalances and external problems. However, in recent years, especially since Trump, many within this group have experienced a significant shift in perspective. While I’m unsure if more than half have been converted, this conversion is undoubtedly underway.

There’s also a fascinating generational divide among the liberal-leaning Chinese. Those born in the 60s and 70s tend to admire and embrace America more than younger generations do. This is understandable; during their formative years, China was in extreme poverty, while the US emerged from the Cold War as the undeniable global superpower. This generation was educated with exposure to the best aspects of America. Many of them also joined the movement in 1989 in one way or another.

In contrast, for those born after 1995 or even 2000, the picture is entirely different. They’ve grown up with a much stronger China, one that almost stands as a peer to the US, which itself has begun to show signs of imperial decline. Consequently, the fascination with the US has waned.

However, I want to stress that, whether from the traditionalist or liberal-leaning perspective, few Chinese people view the US as an “enemy” in the most visceral sense. The US is seen more as a competitor bent on weakening China. Chinese people will gladly compete, but most of them don’t frame this in terms of replacing the US as a global hegemon or in terms of destroying the US. Chinese people don’t measure success by the same metrics of the US—such as having hundreds of military bases worldwide or remaking the global order in their own image.

I anticipate people will criticise me again for “toeing the party line” or call me “CCP shill” here. But I say what I see. And if the “party line” is for peaceful co-existence, I will gladly stick my fat toes on it.

Simone: What fascinates you and what repels you about the United States?

Robert: As someone born in the year 1990, I belong to a generation that represents a watershed moment, sandwiched between cohorts with completely different worldviews. During my adolescence, the prevailing sentiment toward the US was still one of awe. American institutions, laws, economy, culture, and its sheer vitality were fascinating—and to some extent, still are. The US strikes me as the only superpower in history whose energy is largely derived from chaos: a chaos of independent minds, innovation, and a giant furnace where the best ideas are forged. Its strength feels like the energy of a young college student full of big ideas, rebelliousness, and the confidence to shape history. This youthfulness is captivating.

What repels me, however, is that same youthfulness, or more precisely, the self-righteousness born from it. When someone is young, they think they know everything, can do anything, and are always right. They tend to view those who disagree with them as inherently wrong or just plain bad people.

In comparison, China can seem like an older person who has seen it all—perhaps less inspiring, less idealistic, but also more pragmatic and more resilient, and can sometimes be surprisingly more accommodating of different opinions.

I see this paradox play out on platforms like Substack and Twitter, where I am routinely blocked by those who disagree with me (, Michael Fritzell, Wei Ling Ling, to name but a few), while I never block them. Isn’t it ironic that the self-proclaimed champions of free speech often seem unwilling to listen to differing opinions and become the very dogmatic ideologues that they claimed to attack? This isn’t an accident but a pattern: “Agree with me, and you are my friend; disagree, and you are my enemy.”

In public discourses, this self-righteousness is mildly irritating, but when it translates into real-world aggression—like the Iraq War, an action many believed was “the right thing” done with good intentions—it becomes truly dangerous, because it is extremely difficult for self-righteous people to recognise their own mistakes.

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Simone: When you think of the United States, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Robert: Freedom. “The land of freedom” is the first association—a society paradoxically built on the participation of people who have an absolute belief in their own liberties, where many see owning a gun as a logical solution to the horrendous problem of gun violence.

Simone: Is it correct to say that, deep down, there is also a certain fascination in China with the United States?

Robert: Oh, definitely. If you know enough Chinese people, you know that we are highly competitive, both individually and collectively. We strive, consciously and unconsciously, to emulate the best. When the US represents the best, we want to emulate it. The wider the gap between the US and China, the greater the fascination. Conversely, as the gap narrows, or potentially reverses, the fascination diminishes.

I should add that this fascination has not been reciprocal—at least not until recently, the US has never been particularly fascinated by China. But things may start to change now. The outsized reaction to Dan Wang’s Breakneck is a good sign.

Simone: What do the young people you know today think of the United States?

Robert: Please refer to the answer to the first question for details on the generational perspectives.

Simone: I know this might sound like a strange question, but what do you think of phenomena like some Chinese people who appreciate Trump (such as Zhang Hongliang)? Why is that?”

Robert: I think Chinese people who like Trump are drawn to the same qualities that appeal to his American supporters: the appearance of “no bullshit.” Previous US politicians were often skilled at saying pleasant things without saying much of substance.

Chinese people are subjected to an even denser form of political bullshit in their own media. To be sure, these bullshit political messagings (some will call it “propaganda”) serve a practical purpose, which I may write about in the future. But from a human perspective, honestly, they can be quite suffocating. So, when someone like Trump appears, breaking all conventional boundaries in speech and action, it’s natural that some find him refreshing.

Simone: It seems to me that today’s Chinese Americanists mostly interpret the China-US relationship in the light of a desire for cooperation, and not confrontation, is that correct?

Robert: If by “Americanists” you mean those who study the US, then yes, there is definitely a preference for cooperation. However, people are also realistic. There’s a growing impression that cooperation is not what the majority in the US wants with China; confrontation seems inevitable. Psychologically, it’s incredibly difficult for a sitting number one power to concede that it might not remain paramount.

That said, I don’t believe China’s goal is necessarily to become number one. China wants to be the best version of itself. If others can accept that, China will be fine. But if someone stands in its way, China is unlikely to back down either.

Simone: The essay America Against America by Wang Huning is widely discussed here. Is it still highly regarded in China today for understanding American affairs?

Robert: This is a strange paradox. The book is rarely mentioned publicly and is somewhat “censored”; you can’t easily find it except in obscure corners. This is likely because Wang is now one of the most powerful leaders in China, and matters concerning the top leadership are highly sensitive. However, among intellectuals with access to information, the book is highly regarded. Many marvel at how he could write such an incisive analysis of America based on just a six-month stay, over 30 years ago, at a time when most of his peers viewed the US with nothing but admiration.

Do you agree with the statement that the Chinese know the West better than the West knows China?”

Robert: Absolutely. I believe this is the ultimate strategic asymmetry and a key leverage point for China. If we calculate the ratio of people who understand the other side to the total population, China’s ratio is likely orders of magnitude higher than that of the US.

Consider language skills: How many Americans can speak Mandarin and read Chinese fluently? The top, top end of my estimate for this will stand at 10,000 people, or about 0.003% of the population. By contrast, the number of Chinese who can speak, read, and write English fluently is safely in the millions, perhaps 1% of the population when considering functional English speakers due to high school curricula. That’s a whopping 100 - 1000 times more people in absolute terms, and 30 times more in relative terms.1

With such a big gap in terms of understanding basic language, it’s no accident that the gap goes much deeper into other areas.

I can safely bet that 1000 times more Chinese people know what the three branches of the US government are than Americans who know what a “Politburo” is actually made of, and perhaps 10000 more Chinese know the US capital is Washington, DC, than Americans know that the capital city of China is Beijing.

Here in China, many of the commentators have a massive body of knowledge on the other side, having been educated at places like Harvard and Yale. In the US, however, you have people like Noah Smith who writes profusely about China without ever even visiting China or speaking Chinese, and his hundreds of thousands of subscribers don’t seem to find that problematic.

People like Wang Huning, nominally the 4th-most-powerful person in China right now, could have written a masterpiece about the US more than 30 years ago. Can Marco Rubio write a book about China with the same level of authority?

This is a significant, though often overlooked, advantage for China. In a situation where one side’s likelihood of misfiring is way higher than the other side's, the other side holds a huge advantage. Just why do you think Donald Trump botched his trade war with China?

*This Q&A is part of the “Mirror in the mirror” series of China Translated, where I explore the Chinese and American perceptions of the other side.

Before I start, I would like to remind you that a week ago I published the following article evaluating to what extent we are in an AI bubble at , a new newsletter currently at trial stage where I put ideas into investment action, and is not just limited to China. Hope you enjoy:

Robert Wu's Portfolio

We are already in a big AI bubble, but 2 errors stop us from realizing it

With the value of global capital markets concentrated in the US, and US equity markets heavily concentrated in the Magnificent 7, it is quite clear that the single most important factor driving equities today is AI, and the single most important question for the market today is whether we are living through a big AI bubble, and if so, how and when this …

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6 months ago · 35 likes · 7 comments · Robert Wu

With that said, let’s begin the Q&A.

Q: After electric cars and solar, which next cutting-edge technologies do you expect China to take the lead on?

First thing has come to my mind is biotech. Chinese companies have demonstrated a clear advantage in biotech, which is on track to repeat the same EV experience in the next few years. It’s highly likely that 3 years from now, the world will have a full reckoning that so much innovation in drug discovery is happening in China, the same feeling that people now have about EVs. This is what Morgan Stanley has to say about this topic.

For truly unique and groundbreaking innovation, China is betting heavily on commercial nuclear fusion. This year, China has even established a new state-owned enterprise dedicated to this area. We are still far away from commercially viable nuclear fusion, but if any country in the world is able to win this holy grail, it must be China, due to its strong engineering base and the unique ability to marshal society-wide resources into strategic projects.

If China can achieve this, it will not only definitively put aside the debate about whether China can do “real innovation” but also achieve something truly historic for mankind.

Q: Which countries are your readers from? I ask because I see so much written with the American reader in mind. Even Canadians who write for a living write for an American audience. I think that is a detriment, because people read just an American perspective … How did you find Substack? Maybe you chose this because you exactly wanted to connect with American readers?

A: This is the distribution of China Translated’s readers:

It’s true that US readers make the largest bloc, at 32%. This is understandable since Substack is a US app. All English-speaking countries and territories make up ~60%. Non-Anglo Europe accounts for around 20%. There are also a sizable number of readers from India and Brazil. Overall, I believe my readership profile is quite balanced, and I don’t see myself specifically writing to an American audience.

A core reader bloc consists of overseas Chinese people, mostly second- and third-generation immigrants from Singapore, Malaysia, the US, Thailand, Indonesia, Canada, Australia, and even Mexico. I speculate that this bloc accounts for at least 20% of all readers, but they tend to be the most committed, so that they make up perhaps around 50% of paying subscribers (the same also holds true for Baiguan).

I think this totally makes sense. For the overseas Chinese community, China is familiar and strange at the same time. Similar cultural upbringing has conditioned them well to appreciate the deeper logic behind many phenomena, so China becomes a relatively easier subject for them than, say, Americans. Still, their home countries are very different from China, so they also struggle to make sense here and there. Being ethnic Chinese also makes them curious about what’s going on in China. All of these mean that they have a strong demand to understand, yet the number of trustworthy sources out there for them is not many. I suppose that’s why they have found me.

Q: What would be your take on these accounts of the dramatic Tiananmen Square events in 1989?

Ahh… This is a tough one.

Tiananmen was such a controversial event that, over the years, its life as a political symbol has continued to grow. Although I was born after that, it was also a “visceral” experience for me. The first time I learned about it also marked “the first pivot” of my political awakening, which I documented well in this article.

My overall assessment of the event has progressed from shock, to anger, to understanding, and finally to a very complicated feeling now. It’s one of those subjects that I would one day want to write about in a more fully fleshed-out way. However, before that, I highly recommend watching the documentary "The Gate of Heavenly Peace." This is the most balanced piece of work out there I have ever seen on this subject, and a must-watch for anyone who wants to form an opinion on this issue.

For my own opinions, let me just share several key takes that are less frequently talked about in the general discourses:

1. The events in 1989 were not limited to Beijing. Almost all of China's major cities saw large protests. Many people from my parents’ generation joined those “protests” from all over China. My mother didn’t even think it was a protest, but rather like joining a festival. So it was not just any protest. It was a nationwide mass movement that demanded an answer in one form or another.

2. Most people tend to overlook the fact that, at the core of this event, was a significant power struggle at the top. Just as the Cultural Revolution was a power struggle at the core, with Mao rallying the masses outside to smash his adversaries, the events in 1989 could also well turn into a palace coup with strong popular support from the outside. In fact, the power struggle aspect of the event was what kept the protests alive for more than 2 months. Protestors knew that there was indecisiveness and internal differences inside Zhongnanhai, and the protests dragged on way beyond the point where they could be resolved peacefully.

3. Had the protestors succeeded, it would be certain that the student leaders would join the upper echelon of China’s power structure. However, considering their demeanors during the protests, I am extremely doubtful that they can handle this well. They were college kids with lofty dreams and big ideas learned from Western books. In that regard, these students were not so different from the elders that they sought to topple, who were also once Western-inspired students as well, agitating for a revolution 70 years prior, before they themselves were hardened by decades of war and struggles. So, if these kids had their way, I don’t think they would be able to govern a vast country with a GDP per capita of only $311 at the time and a population that mostly had zero inkling of an idea of what democracy means. They would quickly lose control. In the ensuing chaos, something far worse, such as a military dictatorship, could emerge from the cracks.

I don’t deny that I am also traumatized by the human costs of that event. But if you do enough research from all sides and thinking about it, by June of that year, if things hadn’t developed in the ghastly way they eventually did, the best-case scenario I could imagine is that China would become what Russia is today. I will leave you to decide which one is more preferable. I believe you already know my answers.

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Q: How does the work culture in the Chinese work environments you can speak about compare to the American work culture described in the comments section here?

A: Historically, hard work and extreme hard work are cherished. Such as the infamous “996” culture. However, in recent years, a growing backlash has emerged against this. Despite this change, I still believe Chinese people are comparatively more workaholic than most other peoples. The whole concept of “involution” wouldn’t be a subject of controversy if it ceases to exist.

Q: You wrote that “Using a VPN is illegal in China”. Would you please cite the relevant section of the criminal code and which section or article it comes under? Here’s the link to the Criminal Code in English:

A: Illegal doesn’t necessarily mean “criminal” in China. A criminal conviction can lead to imprisonment and more severe penalties. However, many illegal actions may only lead to monetary fines, and sometimes only a warning.

Using a VPN falls under that category.

You may refer to “中华人民共和国计算机信息网络国际联网管理暂行规定Interim Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on the Management of International Networking of Computer Information Networks”:

Section 6: Computer information networks that directly connect to international networks must use the international channels provided by the state public telecommunications network. No unit or individual may establish or use other channels for international networking.

Section 14 also specifies that breaching of Section 6 can lead to:

The public security organ shall order the termination of networking, issue a warning, and may concurrently impose a fine of not more than 15,000 yuan.

Q: For a good while, it used to be the case that the Chinese were more materialistic rather than idealistic or spiritual. But, the young generations tend to perceive a need for more spirituality. And, meanwhile, China proved rather outstanding in systematic studies, in sciences. My question is: How do the Chinese stand regarding scientific studies that suggest the existence of a spiritual domain? Viz., studies of Chi Gong, of ‘distance healing,’ and “near-death experiences.” Can you go to WeChat, enter a bookstore or a library, and find works on those topics? How much public interest there is for those fields?

A. The interest in the mystic is huge and has always been huge. This is always the deep undercurrent in China that few people can see and quantify exactly. You will be surprised by the number of highly educated people who are into fortune-telling. I am also quite interested in these kinds of topics, but I am approaching them more as a skeptic. You probably don’t know yet, but I have “secretly” opened a newsletter about this almost a year ago, called . So far, I have written only one essay, about one mystic experience, but you may expect me to be more serious about this newsletter, perhaps when I get older and have more free time.

Q: Mencius: “There are three things which are unfilial, and to have no posterity is the greatest of them.” (Mn. 4A.26). Among the current generations of Chinese, does failure to have descendants cause a sense of guilt? If so, in what percentage of childless people, and to what degree?

A: That sense of guilt is rapidly diminishing in contemporary China. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have such a significant drop-off in the birth rate.

Q: My impression, which could be mistaken, is that Chinese manufacturing is pretty efficient and advanced, and while not necessarily the best or most efficient in every category of manufacturing, not too far away. However, when it comes to services, my impression is that China is generally much less efficient and productive than the US. First, does that seem accurate? And secondly, if that is accurate, what’s your opinion on why productivity lags in China’s service sector?

A: It’s not a matter of efficiency, but a difference of perceived value and story-telling. Services are all about trust. Western societies are mature in the modern era, so naturally their services are perceived to be of higher value. Just think of the Big 4 accounting firms, and think about which Chinese audit firm that can come to your mind who can rival the Big 4. Or think of McKinsey, and then think about which Chinese consulting firms come to your mind. I doubt any names come into your mind.

It’s not that Chinese audit firms or consulting companies are not as good, but when people pay for McKinsey or KPMG’s services, it’s not just the “services” per se they are looking for, but also the fact that this is done by McKinsey. That logo itself carries a lot of value, even most of the value.

In the professional data and information industry I operate in, there are also similar issues which make this industry in China a tiny fraction of what it is in the West. I keep a separate niche newsletter about this called . In case you are interested, below is the first essay of that newsletter:

Data Currency

#1 One of very few Chinese industries that is still ~1/100 of the West

Welcome to the inaugural essay of Paid Sub, a newsletter on the market intelligence, Data-as-a-service, professional knowledge, and paid content industry in China…

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a year ago · 25 likes · 1 comment · Robert Wu

Another major service industry, and perhaps the largest service industry, is healthcare. But here, it may just be the opposite. China’s healthcare industry is all about efficiency. In fact, perhaps because it is “too efficient”, its total GDP is nothing compared with the bloated US healthcare system.

Q: There is a lot of talk about purges in the PLA. Having family who’ve served in various nations’ military I’m aware of what a purge means there, which usually is the general being “fired” from his current assignment, given a pleasant job until the relevant MIC-IMATT figures out how they can use him to funnel more money their way in another position. In other words a purge is rarely a moment where criminal activities are punished by severe actions. What happens in the PLA when a group of generals are purged? Is it usually fatal to career, if not life?

A: In China, “purge” usually leads to various degrees of punishment, from imprisonment down to demotion to an extremely lowly rank, and is usually fatal to career. Death penalties are extremely rare though nowadays.

In a high-profile “purge” not related to the PLA, Qin Gang, who has been our Foreign Minsiter for a few months in 2023 before his “purge”, has reappeared again recently, showing not only he is alive and well but it’s possible his career may still have a future.

Q: Which of your subjects gets the most interest from readers?

A: I think you can have a rough sense from a look at the ranking of my most popular essays. Most of these articles focus on “narratives” and deep cultural barriers that lead to cognitive errors when viewing China. I call this type of content “mirror in a mirror” and have a whole tag dedicated to it now. One recent surprise is the article Breakneck, the big parade, and mirrors in mirrors, which falls along this line.

Q: Maybe you can write a post about foreigners studying in Chinese universities. For example, what would it entail to try applying to Tsinghua University with only English as a language and then studying there?

A: That could well be a future trend, as China’s universities have become increasingly more competitive globally.

Last week, as part of Baiguan’s first China Tour, we got to visit West Lake University in Hangzhou, one of the few new so-called privately funded research universities in China. They have many international students and faculty members already. We are really impressed. We will write about them in an upcoming post.

Q: How do you get the time to write? You have your own business and life, maybe even young children to raise. I used to have a blog, and it took a lot of effort. With children and now in a foreign country, I know this is so hard to find time.

A: I spent about 20% of my waking time writing. A lot of it happens in my spare time, such as traveling on the road, during weekends, or between business meetings. For me, the most energy-consuming part is to figure out the general structure and flow of my piece. Once that skeleton is ready, filling in the flesh is just a matter of time.

Another helpful device is that when I inevitably write something on social media, I am conscious that parts and bits of it can also be added to my longer piece. For instance, we organize a Discord community for paying subscribers of Baiguan, and I comment quite often in that community, usually responding to members’ questions. When I write there, I am always mindful that some of the writings may be expanded into a full essay. A lot of my essays come from this way. In a sense, I view social media as a testing ground for more structured works.

It’s also worth noting that I enjoy writing. Writing is my way of clearing out my thoughts and putting them into something concrete. Writing is my way of thinking. I view writing as a form of leisure, not labor.

Lastly, although I am busy with work, I don’t have kids yet. Perhaps when I have kids, things will change. We will see.

Q: An Asia Times article from Dec 4, 2023. reports that spitting, loud throat clearing and smoking have vanished from the streets of Beijing. Can you or anyone you know tell us more about it? Are these changes lasting? And, for them to happen, who did what?

A: If 20 years ago these uncivilized behaviors happened at the frequency of a 10, then at least in major cities, it stands at perhaps 2-3 at the moment. Not really vanished, but significantly less frequent than before. Smoking is still quite a problem, but in cities like Shanghai, no-smoking-indoor policies, which were only introduced a few years ago, have been well-enforced.

I think this transition to more civility is just inevitable, as China transitioned from a rural society to an urban one. You have to remember, spitting, throat clearing or smoking as you wish won’t be a problem at all if you live in a village, plowing your own fields.

Q: As a CEO of a Chinese startup, if you were to start going to your workplace by bicycle, how do you expect your colleagues, your employees, and business partners would react to it? And, would it make a difference if the bike is ordinary (mechanical) or an e-bike?

A: There won’t be much of a reaction. This is considered normal. There is no protocol on how a CEO should travel here. Maybe if my company is just not big enough. If I am a Fortune 500 CEO and bike to the office, I still don’t think people will be surprised. China has a long history of cycling. And nowadays, outdoor sports are also quite in fashion.

Maybe riding an e-bike to work for a CEO is slightly weird.

Immediately after the Bund Summit, we started Baiguan’s first China tour, bringing more than a dozen investors and business leaders from Asia, US and Europe through a 4-day tour of large and small Chinese companies in consumer and deep tech industries, meeting with local founders and senior managers. Our team will share many of our takeaways from this tour next week in the Baiguan newsletter.

The participants in the China tour are impressed by various kinds of progress that Chinese companies have been making, but they are not without concerns. One prominent question touched on an especially binary risk. A European investor, badly burned by the Russian experience, asked several times during the trip: Can and will the US shut China off the US dollar system? How can we prepare for such a risk?

In fact, at this year’s Bund Summit, one prominent economist also asked exactly the same question during a VIP session, and he provided quite a convincing answer.

I will not name him but refer to him simply as the Economist here, and I will summarize his key logic for you in this essay.

While I was busy meeting people, big meetings were taking place on the world stage. Top trade officials from the US and China (which, of course, included Mr. Li Chenggang) met in Kuala Lumpur, followed by the much-anticipated meeting between Xi and Trump in Busan, South Korea.

By now, it’s safe to say that the 7-month-long US-China trade war has come to a full pause. Both sides have shown their cards. And although it’s debatable if China has emerged as a victor, there is no doubt that the US is the loser, so much so that I find myself strangely agreeing with , someone I normally would not agree with on virtually anything else.

Tariff

On the tariff front, China stood her ground. Not only did the 100% tariff hike threatened by Trump evaporate almost immediately after it was announced, but China also had a 10% further reduction in the “fentanyl tariff”. With a combined tariff rate of around 47%, China’s exports to the US are now as competitive as those of other parts of the world, and in some cases even more competitive, such as when compared with India and Brazil.

What’s more important is that half a year of these US tariffs hasn’t meaningfully hurt China’s exports at all. Why? The Economist believed that the key reason is that, in the seven years since the first trade war, China’s businesses have already built up a sophisticated global supply chain. This is not about transhipment, but genuine production and assembly in third-party countries, utilizing upstream materials and components sourced from China.

The Economist pointed out that the US wants 3 impossible things at the same time: high growth, low inflation and reducing trade deficit. If the US wants high growth while reducing trade deficit, there will be high inflation. If the US wants low inflation while reducing trade deficit, some kind of recession must happen.

Since growth and inflation are more important, the US has to make sacrifices on the trade deficit, at least for now. This ensures that, according to the Economist, there will always be TACO.

Export control

Another important aspect of trade wars is the export control on key supply chains. Here, the tables have completely turned. After the Kuala Lumpur-Busan talks, the US agreed to delay the so-called “BIS 50% rule” by one year, in exchange for China to delay the implementation of its rare earth export control as well.

October marked the first time China played the rare earth card against the US. And China has played this well. No longer is it a one-sided battle with only China suffering. Now, for the first time, the US has also realized that it could also be vulnerable.

The US and China now have a stranglehold on each other, but the pains are asymmetrical. For China, the expectation of restrictions on its technology has persisted for at least seven years. However, the US has only just begun to realize it. However, at least a few years will pass from realizing the problem to solving it. And by that time, China will hopefully have made significant progress as well.

What’s aiding this asymmetry is that China now apparently doesn’t seem keen on purchasing Nvidia’s high-end chips, showing preparedness and determination to finally break free.

All of this asymmetry, according to the Economist, ensures that US tech export control will not be an effective weapon in the near future.

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Financial sanctions?

Given that both tariff and export control measures have been defanged from the US, it is just natural that the imagery and wording from the Busan meeting marked the first time China has been recognised by its counterparty as a real peer.

But what about the financial sanctions? The Economist believes that this is the only important weapon left in the US arsenal. So far, the US side has refrained from using it. But will it ever use it?

Read more

I wrote in that first article:

Like any divorce, it can be really nasty. Tension can run extremely high. Like any divorce, there is a scramble to decide on what belongs to whom. Like any divorce, there will be minimal interest for each side to talk to each other. Like any divorce, the couple try to “decouple” from each other as soon as possible.

But, there are key differences between a divorce and a war, even just a cold war.

War is zero-sum, while divorce only means two sides parting their ways.

Divorced people don’t have to destroy each other. In fact divorced people still have common issues at stake here. After all, the world is not just about these two. For instance, they still have to take care of their children, just in the same way the US and China should take care of common existential problems plaguing our humanity.

Whether China and the US can manage this Great Divorce so that they do not have to bother about each other, nor do they have to hurt each other, while in the meantime finding a workable mechanism to manage common interests, will be the single most geopolitical thing in our century.

Today, I am announcing that I will shut down that separate newsletter and will merge it with this one, China Translated. From now on, all the US-China-related content will be published under the tag, The US-China ‘Great Divorce’ of China Translated.

There are two things that motivate me to make this decision. First is the administrative reason. Often, I feel that what I want to write for The Great Divorce can also be written here at China Translated. For instance, during the US-China trade war, I sent duplicate articles to the two mailing lists simultaneously, such as this one about whether the US or China had the upper hand in the trade war, and this one about how the trade war has changed the world forever. Since 75% of The Great Divorce subscribers are also subscribers of China Translated, I don’t want to spam you with too many emails.

The second reason is deeper. I think when I first wrote about the Great Divorce, my expectation was that these divorce proceedings would drag on for years, even decades. Now we are at the end of Q3 of 2025, but I am having this strong feeling that things have moved much faster than I originally expected.

Back in December, there was no DeepSeek. No one expected China would crawl out of the shadow of technological containment so soon. No one expected China to ban the purchase of Nvidia GPUs so soon. Nor was anyone imagining that China could become a self-referencing mirror for America to look at its own shortcomings. Nor was there any expectation that Trump could botch the trade war with China so spectacularly, and then would fold his hands so quickly.

However, within a span of nine months, many of the previous assumptions have already been shattered. As the two sides seem to be signing the papers over the fate of TikTok US, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that they are also signing the divorce papers already.

Maybe I am saying it too early. Only time will tell. If there is anything more to it, I will just publish it here, under the new tag, so you won’t miss anything.

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Below is the archive of articles published at . With only 12 articles, I covered many topics, including TikTok refugees on RedNote, the battle for top talents, Biden Administration’s last-minute export control policies, the “reverse-Nixon” nonsense, the chatter about a potential “Grand Bargain” regarding Taiwan, and, of course, the trade war.

#1 The Great Divorce: Marriage counseling for US & China

Already published here

#2 Gestures of goodwill for “US-China friendship”

Jan 02, 2025

There were 2 interesting pieces of news regarding US-China relations in the last few days.

The first one is about pandas. According to China Daily:

Two individuals who allegedly benefited from spreading rumors about panda abuses online have been transferred to prosecutors for further review after police in Sichuan province closed the investigation.

Announcing the latest development of the case in a statement on Friday, the Dujiangyan public security bureau noted that the suspects had not only allegedly fabricated and spread false information about giant pandas, but also incited people to interfere with the work of animal experts and government agencies.

…

The duo — one surnamed Bai and the other identified as Xu — were also suspected of defaming organizations and experts in the animal protection field, such as the National Forestry and Grassland Administration and China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Panda, as well as inciting netizens to oppose international cooperation on giant panda conservation, it said.

According to Bloomberg:

Police in Sichuan accused two people of spreading false information that the bears, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, were mistreated at the National Zoo in Washington, according to an official statement on Friday. The man and woman also incited boycotts of international efforts to conserve the animals, authorities alleged.

The law enforcement action contrasted with China’s jab at the US last year over the health of a panda at the Memphis Zoo after images showed it looking emaciated. Both countries denied there was any foul play, although Chinese diplomat Hua Chunying fanned anger by comparing the panda’s condition with a photo of the bear looking healthier back in Beijing.

In other news, the People’s Daily has quite ostensibly called for the submission of stories showcasing the “US-China co-operation and friendship”.

The intentions of these gestures seem too obvious: to prepare for the second coming of Donald Trump, China wants to look nice to the US.

But the whole episode does feel a bit pretentious, and frankly, embarrassing. I’d prefer us to have more predictable patterns and less zigzagging swings. For those pandas, do they really need to spend over a year to announce that this is actually fake news? Can we all try to instill a strong sense of principle and authenticity in our foreign policy so we can be taken more seriously by the international community?

#3 This is the ultimate contest between US and China

Jan 03, 2025

For the past few days, I have been watching with sheer amazement at how the likes of Elon Musk argue with the MAGA base on the virtues of H1B visas. The civil war between tech-bro MAGA and real MAGA has finally erupted.

On the one hand, I totally agree with Elon that immigration of high-skilled labor is the single most important factor for the US to keep its competitive edge over China right now. On the other hand, I am keenly aware that telling many Americans in their face that they are not good enough, that they are not smart enough, and that they are just too dumb to be employable, is a political dynamite that will explode one day or another. Politics simply won’t work this way.

People - the final frontier of US-China competition

First, we need to understand the central role the people factor plays in the US-China competition, a.k.a the Great Divorce.

Right now, America actually does not have so much leverage on China. Sure, the US can impose tariffs on Chinese goods, but there are clear limits to how much they can impose. After all, the US is but one market that China exports to, and US companies (Apple, Tesla, etc) also reap massive profits from working with China.

Sure, the US can impose export controls on key technologies. Small yard, high-fence. However, the recent model of DeepSeek, a potent but fantastically cheap AI model has demonstrated that those export controls not only fail to blunt progress, but may actually force Chinese people to be smarter.

But there is one edge that the US can expect to enjoy for the foreseeable future: its ability to create truly ground-breaking, zero-to-one innovation.

In the case of AI, this is the ability to create OpenAI-level, ChatGPT-level innovation in the first place.

It is no surprise, in a veiled response to DeepSeek, Sam Altman tweeted:

it is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works.

it is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don’t know if it will work.

individual researchers rightly get a lot of glory for that when they do it! it’s the coolest thing in the world.

it’s also extremely hard to rally a big talented research team to charge a new hill in the fog together.

this is key to driving progress forward.

I think his “a new hill in the fog” analogy is exactly right.

Of the whole world, only America has this kind of spirit in large quantity.

Note that quantity is important here. Every society has geniuses, but to mobilize geniuses together to create unimaginable wonders requires critical mass.

How does America achieve this?

First, it has a highly failure-tolerant culture. In America, you are okay to fail. You are okay to dream of things like sending rockets to the sky as a private company, even if it had never been tried before by non-state actors.

You are okay to bet on the value of large-language models, even if they have never been proven to work before.

You are okay to test out crazy ideas, and there will be still enough people backing your crazy ideas.

In China, on the other hand, we don’t have that kind of culture. Even if you may have some crazy ideas, you have to persuade many, many people - investors, employees, regulators, media - that your crazy ideas actually can work, and all of them will doubt it, because you can’t prove, simply by talking, that it will actually work. They will tell you, why do you waste your time? Why can’t you work on something more practical? Without their backing, you can never make your ideas into reality. Therefore, most of the “0-1 innovators” in China will be caught in this chicken-and-egg problem.

Things become much easier when, and only when, a first variant has already been proven to work. Be it EV, private space exploration, or ChatGPT, when the US companies prove that some new concept works, the Chinese companies would scramble to catch up, scale, iterate, and can usually be much more efficient than the original variant. China has an overabundance of “1-to-100” innovators, so long as that “0-1” has been proven to work. We act exceptionally well when the yardstick is hanging right there, just like how well we perform at schools when the scores are hanging right there. This is what we are good at (This is by the way why I think export controls will never be able to blunt China’s progress. Scaling on existing innovation is China’s comparative advantage.)

America’s second weapon is its ability to attract the best talents from around the world, who are mostly attracted by this failure-tolerant culture, who in turn will also help to contribute to this culture.

Here, China has significant disadvantages. Language barriers and cultural differences already make China nearly impossible to attract most non-Chinese talents, while it also keeps losing many of its own talents to the US. So while the US is attracting the best of the talents from all over the world, China is only able to attract some top talents from China. This smaller pool makes it difficult for China to achieve the “critical mass” of top talents that is necessary for the most cutting-edge research.

But our relative lack of top talents is more than made up for by its abundance of engineers, who enable China to always quickly learn from the new frontiers of innovation and quickly build processes that can provide scale to technologies.

In such light, America’s best strategy is clear:

1. Do not count on holding back China’s technological progress, because it will never work. Learning from the best is our top skill.

2. Maintain the failure-tolerant culture and keep attracting the smartest people from all over the world, so that the US can always keep a 6-18 month lead time over China.

This is why I think Elon Musk is totally right here. He already sees the truth. It’s also interesting that Trump chose to side with Elon in this case, showing that Trump is actually smarter than he appears to be (and also that since he has already won the re-election, he could give a smaller F about his voters.)

However, this is a very inconvenient truth, and I don’t think the MAGA base will ever be able to stomach it. I consider the exploding Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel to be a warning from this base.

If (and I think it’s very likely) the US slides more and more into this kind of anti-immigrant culture, it might lose its only remaining edge over China.

The question is, is China able to seize on this opportunity? In our century’s competition of “who is less worse比烂”, the jury will still be out on this one for a long time.

#4 DoD believes Tencent is linked to PLA

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has just added Chinese technology companies Tencent and the world’s largest battery maker, CATL, to its list of firms allegedly linked to China’s military, which is the so-called “CMC List.” This designation, which includes a total of 134 companies, signifies that these firms are believed to be involved in activities that could support military operations or capabilities.

The inclusion of Tencent and CATL on this list has led to significant declines in their stock prices, with Tencent’s shares dropping around 7% in Hong Kong in the following trading session, which is quite a dramatic move for China’s largest company by market capitalization.

I am not sure how DoD’s assertion makes sense. Tencent really is not a defense contractor. Yes, DoD can always argue that PLA personnel use Tencent’s instant messaging app and WeChat payment, which qualifies Tencent as being linked to the PLA. But if the same logic applies, baby diaper manufacturers can well be included in that list, too.

In a public statement, Tencent states that:

As the Company (Tencent) is neither a Chinese military company nor a military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base, it believes that its inclusion in the CMC List is a mistake. Unlike other lists maintained by the U.S. Government for sanctions or export control measures, inclusion in the CMC List relates only to U.S. defense procurement, which does not affect the business of the Group.

The CMC List is also distinct from the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex List (NS-CMIC List) maintained by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control, and inclusion in the CMC List will not prohibit any persons (other than the Department of Defense) from business dealings with the Company, including transacting in the securities of the Company.

Obviously, the inclusion into the CMC List does not really mean anything for Tencent, as I doubt the US defense industry is working with Tencent at all. The market’s real fear is whether this is only the precursor to the much more serious NS-CMIC List.

So let’s do a little thought experiment here, assuming the worst, that Tencent will be added to the NS-CMIC List, an event that has a non-zero chance, and that has just become significantly more likely.

What if Tencent is added to NS-CMIC?

First, Tencent’s main business line should be fine. For instance, its flagship chat and social media app, WeChat, will be unaffected. Should the US sanction WeChat so that American phone makers like Apple won’t be able to include that in their app stores, it will just be the loss of Apple. Chinese consumers will be forced to switch to domestic phones such as Huawei. But the relative market power of Apple vis-a-vis Tencent is only such that Chinese consumers, by and large, will make that choice, and Apple will forever have to exit the Chinese consumer market.

Secondly, Tencent’s access to US technology, such as advanced chips and game engines, will be severely curtailed. However, I believe Tencent is getting closer to being sustainable based on Chinese tech. In this case, Tencent is like another Huawei, a world-class company with enough technical know-how and a bottomless pool of R&D resources. So I am not worried.

The last worry is the most substantial. The US may restrict US investors from buying Tencent’s shares. This has been done to some state-owned enterprises like China Mobile and CNOOC.

And it did create some immediate-term pains. When China Mobile was included in that list, it experienced a brief drop-off in a year when US investors exited the shares in 2021. But, in the following years, China Mobile’s shares almost doubled to reach new highs. The same thing also happened to others, such as CNOOC.

This happened because of 2 reasons.

First, US sanctions have made sanctioned companies’ shares extremely cheap. At their lowest, China Mobile had a dividend yield of over 10%, while CNOOC had almost 15% of the dividend yield. These are the largest telecom companies in China, with over a billion users or some of the largest oil companies in the world. Such a level of dividend yield is simply too attractive to ignore.

Then, there is the question of who has been utilizing such a golden opportunity to buy. It’s not just Chinese investors, but investors from Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, Latin America - everywhere around the world except for the US. So essentially, the US sanction amounts to a form of charity for non-US investors.

So if the same thing happens to Tencent, it will be an even bigger move of charity, because Tencent represents the highest-quality companies that China has to offer. It will be a bonanza for the world if it is ever sanctioned.

I guess the moral of the story is that there is only so much a sanction can achieve today. Sanctions only work when you have absolute leverage over the opponents. But once you don’t have that kind of leverage, sanctions will only shoot your own feet.

I sincerely hope cooler heads prevail in DC.

#5 For a brief moment, the Berlin Wall fell

But this time West Berliners escaped to the East Berlin, and East Berlin doesn’t know what to do with them.

Jan 15, 2025

For the last 2 days, China and China-related internet have been obsessed with a phenomenon that absolutely no one predicted to be possible. TikTok users, fearing the platform will be shut down soon, “fled” as refugees to, of all places, a Chinese app called 小红书Rednote, which doesn’t even have a full English version.

In many ways, the whole saga about TikTok, which may be the first ever app to be simultaneously inaccessible from both the US and China, is unprecedented. The current “Great Rednote Exodus” adds another layer of drama: it’s as if the Berlin Wall broke down, but the West Berliners fled to East Berlin this time.

I am sure many of you are already familiar with the explosion of memes during this spectacle. If not, I recommend this article by Yaling Jiang of Following the Yuan, or the video below by my teammate, Amber Zhang

The whole episode is funny and extremely ironic.

Politics deprive ordinary people of the right to use certain apps for fear of national security, and so they choose to pour into another platform that strictly belongs to the “other side”, if only just to make a statement. (On Rednote, many “TikTok refugees” make wry jokes about inviting “Chinese spies” to have a look at them. I even saw a girl disclosing her social security number.)

But a larger irony is awaiting: China’s censorship has obviously been very anxious at this unprecedented “reverse-wave” of online users.

There is definitely not (yet) a crackdown on this movement in China, which will look and feel extremely dumb both domestically and internationally. Many Chinese commentators, even traditionally nationalistic ones, are throwing their weight to discourage regulators from senseless meddling.

But there are no signs of being accommodating either. For instance, many parts of the Rednote app still have no English translation. If the Rednote team really wanted to get hold of this surprising growth, they should have fixed it in 24 hours, with classic Chinese speed. Yet they had not. On the other hand, there are already many reports of foreign accounts being shut down, some with seemingly no reason.

If I have to bet my money on it, there will be a slow but deliberate “wind-down” of this drama. For instance, a simple “Douyin-TikTok”-style separation of domestic and international versions should do the trick. After all, China’s social media, as of today, is ill-equipped to have a breakthrough of the GFW, even if it’s a reverse breakthrough.

But all my realism aside, I can’t help but be touched by the humanity we are witnessing here, even if it can be as fleeting as the Christmas Truce.

One of my favorite comments on this is below (with Claude’s translation):

On Rednote, I saw U.S. military personnel stationed in Korea posting about being exhausted. Under “cat tax” photos, there were discussions about why everyone worldwide keeps tabby cats. Chinese people help Americans with math homework, while Americans help Chinese with English cloze tests. Americans say their education isn’t great so their help might be wrong, and Southerners from both countries commiserate about their accents being looked down upon in tests. Arizona rednecks show off their big fish catches, and the comments section is full of Rednote-style responses with others showing even bigger catches.

Disco Elysium fans share photos of their Chinese fan meetups, with foreigners commenting it must be heaven. Black musicians share their performances and explanations. Chinese users ask Americans if they need two jobs to survive, generating over a thousand replies about people’s work experiences. Western women contribute new content to Western fandom circles. Native Americans post educational videos, with the most popular comments asking about their food - what they eat, how it tastes, and if it’s expensive for tourists. North Indians discuss with Chinese linguists whether their language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, exchanging phonetic comparison tables.

I saw cows from farms just 15 minutes’ drive from me, and cattle, horses, and donkeys on desolate farms across different states. Farmers showing off their giant turnips they just pulled. American female miners going underground, female scientists conducting experiments. Chinese birdwatchers looking for rare foreign birds, with hundreds of rare bird photos in the comments.

It feels like we’ve fast-forwarded directly from the chat room era of ICQ and MSN Spaces to the present, as if everything in between was just a dream.

That last sentence is especially poignant.

Isn’t this dramatic event what our Internet was supposed to be about?

My many memories flashed back. 20 years ago, it was only natural for me to log on to MSN every day and book a time with my pal in Belgium so we could play a WWII game together later that evening. In our long-forgotten memory, the event we are seeing today was not “unprecedented” at all.

I can’t help but wonder, why the people on both sides of the Pacific are so screwed by our political leaders?

What, have we done to ourselves?

#6 State media shows support for “TikTok refugees” by linking to a slogan on Tiananmen

Jan 16, 2025

The “TiTok refugees” have been all the rage for several days by now, but official media has been quite silent on this, leaving many people uneasy about how this story will end. In fact, from what I gather, many people working at state media all want to say something supportive because this thing is so good, but because of the obviously sensitive nature of this event, many of them have been held down.

What if this thing virals out of control, especially given China’s strict social media regulatory regime? But staying silent doesn’t seem like an option either, because looks really bad to be silent while the people revel.

Just now, a major state media outlet, 长安街知事, run by Beijing Daily Group, just broke the line with a fascinating piece. Whoever wrote this piece is a really shrewd person. Essentially, s/he couched this piece under a slogan written on the wall of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is: “世界人民大团结万岁Long Live the Great Solidary of World’s Peoples”

This type of messaging, if done correctly, is crucial, as it helps shape the overall discourse around the issue for the public as well as the leadership to see, which will in turn shape the course of action later.

Below is a machine translation with light editing:

After browsing Xiaohongshu, I have a deeper understanding of that slogan on Tiananmen Gate刷完小红书，对天安门城楼这句话理解更深了 .

Within days, Xiaohongshu was suddenly flooded with American users who called themselves ‘TikTok refugees,’ cheerfully settling into their ‘new home.’

An American user posted: ‘The U.S. government is banning TikTok, so we’re looking for alternatives. We appreciate Chinese culture, like “The Three-Body Problem” and “Black Myth: Wukong.”’ Chinese users responded with warm welcomes in both Chinese and English, accompanied by various emoji.

During these interactions, Chinese and American users exchanged life experiences, shared pet photos, and compared daily expenses. Through intensive Q&A sessions, many information gaps were bridged, and long-held stereotypes and misconceptions crumbled. One user excitedly commented, ‘Perhaps this is the real key to achieving global unity among peoples.’

Looking at the bigger picture, various coincidences have led to particularly active civil exchanges between Chinese and foreigners recently. Korean tourists crowd Wukang Road in Shanghai; American children’s choirs sing ‘Ruyi’ in Chinese at the Temple of Heaven; overseas video platforms continue to buzz about ‘Black Myth: Wukong’...

Friendship between nations depends on the connection between their peoples, and connections are built through mutual understanding. As users noted, this situation recalls the slogan on Tiananmen Gate - ‘Long Live the Great Unity of the World’s Peoples.’ Isn’t this what people truly desire?

Thomas Friedman, author of ‘The World Is Flat,’ once wrote that when ‘The Martian’ was released in 2015, American audiences would spontaneously applaud scenes showing China and NASA’s successful cooperation, making one wonder: ‘Why can’t we always be like this? How much better would the world be?’

‘The hope for U.S.-China relations lies with the people, its foundation is in civil society, and its future rests with the youth.’ Indeed, since the initial thawing of U.S.-China isolation, despite the ebb and flow of great power politics, civil exchanges have remained the true bond between the two nations. From the emergence of 40,000+ Chinese restaurants across America to Yao Ming’s warm welcome in Houston; from Chinese TV brands selling 8,000 units daily in America being praised as ‘durable as tanks,’ to Shanghai Disney’s rainy opening day when Chinese officials declared ‘rain brings wealth’... In those years, ocean currents flowed ceaselessly, isolation became history, and trade and cultural exchanges unified the world. Thousands traveled daily between China and America, as if shuttling through a global village.

The resilience and stability that have weathered historical storms are distinct features of civil exchanges between China and America, backed by universal recognition of truly universal values like ‘peace,’ ‘friendliness,’ and ‘goodness.’ Recent changes in the situation mainly stem from certain forces deliberately trying to ‘demolish the Tower of Babel’ and ‘partition the global village’ for their own interests, attempting to return the world to a fragmented era.

A key tactic has been using media hegemony to distort real information, making Americans ‘view the other side through a straw.’ Many Western politicians and media outlets continuously smear China, demonizing it with lies about being ‘undemocratic and unfree,’ ‘using forced labor,’ and ‘poor and backward.’ These manipulations not only blur China’s true face but also trap Americans in the illusion of a ‘city upon a hill,’ making them accept astronomical medical bills, high-interest student loans, self-reliance in disasters, scarce security, and inevitable wars...

However, ‘you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ The so-called tide of history is an irreversible force. The long evolution of history has repeatedly proven that humanity’s need for ‘unity’ can only be delayed, not severed, as natural as the ‘Hello world’ first output in a computer program. Despite ups and downs in U.S.-China relations, the desire for friendly exchanges between Chinese and American peoples hasn’t changed, and Americans’ wish to understand the ‘truth about China’ will only grow stronger.

China has always worked to build bridges, pave roads, and provide convenience for civil exchanges between the two countries. For many American politicians and media outlets, isn’t this wave of ‘migration’ to Xiaohongshu a wake-up call? They should recognize that ‘attempting to stop Chinese-American civil, friendly exchanges is like trying to cut water with a knife - it only flows stronger,’ and stop creating a ‘chilling effect’ or futilely fabricating absurd lies.

The first air route between China and the U.S. ended in San Francisco - where the Chinese first arrived in America, where both nations signed the UN Charter, and where the two countries established their first sister cities. At that time, San Francisco’s mayor remarked at the airport, ‘U.S.-China air travel has turned the boundless Pacific into a mere river.’ It’s the accumulation of goodwill and friendship that has transformed the vast Pacific from an insurmountable barrier; it’s the people’s mutual engagement that has repeatedly brought U.S.-China relations back on track from low points. We believe that today’s increased movement, visits, and exchanges between Chinese and American peoples will certainly carry forward U.S.-China friendship. The slogan on Tiananmen Gate will shine ever brighter through our efforts.

#7 Whom does America really trust?

Jan 17, 2025

In the final hours of the Biden Administration, the team has been really efficient.

On Monday, the White House announced the Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, effectively putting the majority of the world under restriction in terms of AI chips.

On Wednesday, the Department of Commerce announced issued two rules restricting PRC access to advanced semiconductors, one to update “export controls on advanced computing semiconductors, and another that places additional entities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Singapore on the Entity List.”

The one that really got more attention is definitely the “AI Diffusion” rule on Monday. SemiAnalysis did a really good breakdown of it, and folks at ChinaTalk has assembled an all-star team to discuss about it, so I will not go into details.

The gist: AI chips will be mostly reserved for the elite group of most US-friendly countries, and the companies based in those countries. It will tilt the field towards so-called “hypercalers” such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, while hurting Nvidia (somewhat), Oracle (a lot) and “sovereign AI” projects in the majority of the world.

What’s notable is that quite a number of EU/Nato members and/or traditional friendlies such as Switzerland, Singapore, India, Portugal, Poland and Iceland are put into the “Tier-2”, so facing significant restrictions to acquire advanced AI chips, unless if it comes from the US hyperscalers.

I am sure the chart below will get stuck in our collective psyche for the long term. It could easily be the Chart of the Year (although we are only barely 2 weeks in 2025)

The rule itself is a step-change “improvement” over the previously porous framework, plugging in a major loophole through which Chinese companies can acquire AI chips rerouted from third-party countries or get access to foreign-based computing power. From the standpoint of a sanction policy, it is only natural for this to happen. Otherwise, a sanction that’s too porous is even worse than no sanction at all.

So when you listen to the all-star ChinaTalk podcast, it’s not hard to get a feeling of great relief from the participants. What is also hard to ignore is the feeling that those people really indulge themselves in tactical wins but miss the strategic error. When you focus too much on improving the look of a tree, you risk missing the forest.

So what’s happening in the “forest”? At least 3 things.

First, whatever homegrown efforts to develop chip technology in China just gets some added urgency, and the chance of China developing an independent “technology tree” from the West becomes higher. SemiAnalysis is confident that such a view is FUD and that China won’t get similar technology as the US this year or next. But what about in 5 years? What about in 10 years? Who can be so confident to deny the chance?

Second, the way this regulation is presented is very problematic. The global map divided into 3 colors is likely to live in infamy. It’s really a way to tell the majority of the world whom the US really trusts. Not even if you are an EU or NATO member, not even if you are part of the collective West, you can be trusted. There aren’t many countries that are really trustworthy, and that list is only going to get shorter, too, as time goes by.

Combining the first and second, it’s easy to arrive at a final outcome of this: in due time, China’s tech will evolve and surpass a certain threshold. Given the divided nature of the global technology landscape and scarce resources, it’s likely that China will be forced to innovate onto an alternative technological standard, which, if realized, has the 200-odd countries around the world in color red and yellow to readily embrace it.

In Chinese, there is an idiom called 作茧自缚, or “spinning a cacoon / constructing a wall to trap oneself.”

I have iterated again and again that the only ace card that the US has is the ability to attract top talents from all over the world. Instead of focusing on that part of the strategy, what the US chooses to do is basically construct a walled garden around itself to protect against the outside.

But I am not sure, in a decade’s time, who is inside, who is outside.

#8 Are we close to a Grand Bargain?

Feb 03, 2025

Over the weekend, Trump announced big tariffs.

The 10% additional tariff on China is, honestly, not as bad as many people feared. Yet, the 25% tariffs on Mexico and on America’s forever loyal good old helpless friend Canada took away most of the spotlight.

It is increasingly clear that countering China is not at the top of the priority list of this new Trump-Musk administration. It may not even be part of the priorities at all.

In fact, besides news about tariffs, I wonder whether the other developments won’t actually make the Chinese government happier, such as dismantling USAID:

or dismantling NED:

or nominating someone who doesn’t believe in the “Uyghur genocide” story, nor in America’s necessity to defend Taiwan to fill in the role of acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy:

A Grand Bargain? It surely seems Mr. Beattie is already working on it.

Quite a number of pages on the State Department’s webpage about Taiwan have just been deleted.

This is what the site looked like before:

This is what it looks like now:

Is a Grand Bargain near, and is the Great Divorce rapidly entering the settlement stage?

#9 More chatter about the “Grand Bargain”

Feb 7, 2025

It seems I am not alone in sensing the possibility of a “Grand Bargain” between the US and China.

Bill Bishop wrote:

There continues to be chatter that he is looking for some kind of “big deal” with China, one that would include significant concessions around Taiwan. I am skeptical, but it is worth paying attention to the chatter. Harvard professor Graham Allison renewed talk of the longstanding idea that the Shanghai Communique needs an update to reflect the current world 53 years after its signing, telling Caixin in a Davos interview that “a new communiqué could include a promise by the U.S. never to recognize “an independent country called Taiwan” under any circumstances, while the Chinese mainland pursues peaceful means for reunification with the island.” In an OpEd in the Washington Post this week Allison goes further, suggesting that Trump could consider a bigger strategic shift in US policy towards the PRC, as Richard Nixon did. Pie in the sky? Maybe, but Allison is trying to play a Henry Kissinger-like role and people on both sides talk to him.

I shared similar ideas as this proposal of Graham Allison’s last November when Xi unveiled China’s “4 red lines”. It’s item 3 of the “3 red lines” that America could potentially propose and could potentially get accepted by China:

Does not use force in Taiwan, if it can be ensured that Taiwan does not go on the pro-independence path.

Realistic or not? History is in flux, but each chatter about it by people of consequence shoves us closer to that reality.

In the meantime, it is certainly helpful to witness the “shocking transformation” from a hard-talking neo-con to a thoughtful realpolitik diplomat:

#10 The “Reverse-Nixon” nonsense

Today marked perhaps another “historic moment”, in the same league as the assassination attempt on Trump last year, when Trump and Zelenskyy had a much-televised quarrel during what’s only supposed to be matter of formality, and the “Ukraine minerals” deal seems to be dead before arriving.

Keen students of history understand that although deep economic and cultural factors served as the bedrock of rough contours of history, the exact course of historical development were often dramatically changed by random accidents.

Had Donald Trump not turned his head by a few inches in that fateful rally, he would end up live-streaming his big fat brain smashed to pieces, and we might have been living through the Second American Civil War by now.

I think today also marks one of those days. On what this means for China, I have already shared my opinions here on my main newsletter China Translated

China Translated

After the first month, how bad is Trump for China?

Before I start, there is a small announcement I want to make. I am starting yet another newsletter about the industry I work in and have already dedicated my life to…

Read more

a year ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · Robert Wu

For this post though, I would want to discuss the recently emerging idea that by taking the side of Putin, Trump is attempting a “Reverse Nixon”, only the US is “peeling Russia against China” this time. And some are already asserting today’s event marks another step toward that goal.

This idea is absurd, but it seems a substantial chunk of the Trump Administration actually think they can pull that off.

They can’t pull it off, simply because Nixon is a totally wrong analogy here.

When Nixon “nixoned”, the relationship between China and Russia (Soviet Union) was at an all time low. There was big ideological spat between Khrushchev / Brezhnev and Mao. There were border fightings costing many lives. There was active war mobilisation and even the risk of Soviets nuking China.

So what Nixon and Kissinger did was no more than taking advantage of this already bad blood between the Chinese and the Russians, not as if they single-handedly led China to hate Russia.

In this sense, the “Nixon moment” was no accident like Trump’s big fat brain or Zelenskyy’s mismanaged temper, but a calculated bold move by two ambitious men, pouncing on their prize when the historic opportunity presents itself.

And what could Trump-Rubio possibly achieve here? Is there any chance to “reverse Nixon” just when there is almost no bad tension between China and Russia, the two historical foes, and in fact that relationship is at an all-time high?

Only a naively transactional mind, who indulges in poorly designed strategy games or badly written political sitcoms, would fantasize about this type of nonsense.

#11 The Great Divorce, fast track

#12 A temporary truce, not peace. But the world has changed forever

However, I also pointed out that China is changing too. People evolve, and cultures change in response to changes in the environment. Many of the core roots of China’s “low-trust”, including previous extreme poverty and resetting of social norms as a result of massive urban migration, have changed significantly over the years, so it’s only natural that the society-wide trust level in China has greatly improved from its low-trust base. I don’t think we are in a high-trust society yet, but we have come a long way. Perhaps we are a mid-trust society now, if that’s a thing.

Also relevant to this discussion last time was the role technology played in this transition. Does trust level naturally rise as a correlating function of economic development and rising standards of civility? Or, in the case of China, is technology the core enabler?

Today’s piece will come in the form of a travelogue on a small trip I took last weekend, and some small encounters I had, which I think may shed more light on the mechanics of this ongoing low-to-high-trust transition in China.

I was in Beijing last week, and during the weekend, we went on a road trip to visit a section of the Great Wall that was submerged in the water, about a 3-hour drive east of Beijing. I travel with 2 companions whom I have known since high school, Mr. G and Ms. Y.

On our way there, we decided to make a stop at the 清东陵Eastern Qing tombs, where half of the Qing Dynasty’s royal families were buried, including many of China’s household names such as the Kangxi Emperor, the Qianlong Emperor, and Empress Dowager Cixi. It was also famous for a dramatic tomb-digging event by a Beiyang Warlord in 1928, when the gold and jewelry of Cixi and Emperor Qianlong were taken away, their bodies stripped of anything precious and tossed around like some random trash. For a history buff like me, this should be worth a visit.

It was supposed to be a fun and easy road trip. After about 2 hours of driving, shit-talking, and laughing, we managed to arrive at the Qing tombs. But while we waited to drive into the parking lot, a mini-accident happened. The Haval H6 right in front of us started to back up, but they didn’t notice us and drove not very slowly, so despite the wide distance between our two vehicles, despite me screaming in the shotgun seat and Mr. G pounding on the wheel, and right in front of the gigantic mausoleum area where dozens of Qing emperors and empresses buried themselves, that nasty Haval rammed into us.

All three of us scrambled outside. 5 people got off Haval, including 3 women and 2 men. The driver was a tall man with rash on his face. Looking confused, he seemed to be in his 60s, and all of his entourage looked a similar age to him. Retirees doing a weekend trip together?

We started to assess the damage. It was not serious. The front bumper of our SUV, an orange Tank 300 that we just rented in the morning, was squeezed, but the metallic frame didn’t seem to get hurt at all. Their vehicle was in an even better shape.

There was a silence for 2 minutes. And then, without consulting among ourselves, Y made a unilateral offer: “This damage didn’t seem too big. However, we don’t yet know how to assess the cost. How about this? We don’t need you to pay the cost now, but let me add your WeChat first. Should a cost arise in the future, we will notify you, and you can pay us then.”

This was an ill-advised offer. Even if we forget for a while the fact that this was not our own car but a rental car, and there is a standard procedure to handle events like this, Y obviously didn’t read the room carefully: the retiree party was clearly not on the same page with her.

“What do you mean?”

“WeChat?”

“We pay you the cost?”

“Why are we paying the cost to you?” The driver guy said it with a strong local Tangshan accent.

“Can’t you understand me?!” Y was about to explode, and I tried to calm her down.

The rash guy’s friend, a weasel-looking old man, chimed in: “It was YOU who bumped into us, why should we pay?”

At that moment, I realized what was going on. They were about to lie in broad daylight. Whatever my desire to negotiate with them instantly evaporated. Not just because I was not in the mood to negotiate with bad-faith people, but just in today’s China, it’s technically quite difficult to lie about something like that. I looked around, and there were surveillance cameras from at least 3 sides.

Aren’t they stupid, lying like this?

Since we were dealing with stupid people today, we can only deal with this in a stupid way. First, I placed a call to our rental company and asked for instructions. I was told that I need to call the traffic police first and ask for a Statement for Determination of Fault. Afterward, we should submit the Statement to our insurance company.

Sounds simple. So I called 122, China’s traffic police number, realizing this actually was my first time calling this number. A female operator at the local traffic police station picked up the call, and I spent one minute giving her the details. 20 seconds after she hung up, I received another one, this time from the actual traffic police officer. I explained to him what happened, and he replied to me with something in a strong local dialect. I couldn’t quite make it, but I heard he wanted me to give the phone to the other side. So I complied. The police officer spent the next 5 minutes talking to the rash-faced guy. Sometimes the phone was given to me again, but it was again really hard for me to make out his dialect. And the phone was passed to the rash guy again.

Gradually, I realized what the police officer seemed to suggest: He basically said if both parties agreed on what had happened, he didn’t even have to come but could just settle this thing remotely. But the rash guy still couldn’t agree to my version of the story. It was not an emphatic “no”, but rather a quiet rejection to say “yes”. To be more precise, he also looked a bit puzzled over what was going on. The policeman shrugged through the phone: So be it. I will come. However, be warned that it will take some time.

And so we waited. If we were in a major metropolis, I assumed it would take no more than 5 minutes for the officer to arrive, but because we were in a remote area of a county (Zunhua) of a 3-tier city (Tangshan), that wait was long. I think we waited for at least an hour. The sun was unforgiving, so the two groups of us spent the hour standing under the trees nearby, barely talking to each other. Ironically, because our two vehicles were left blocking one lane to the parking lot, I sometimes also acted as a temporary traffic guy to help redirect other cars to a nearby entrance.

Mr. G, fearing that this group would want to lie in front of the police too, was already looking for the workers at the parking lot to ask for surveillance camera footage. There was a woman working at the toll booth, and she told us the guy who could access surveillance videos on his phone was not available on that day, but she could try to reach him.

While we waited, a BMW with a Beijing car plate pulled up beside us. The driver was a middle-aged guy. Chewing melon seeds in his hands, he was waiting for his friends. He comprehended the situation quite quickly and was laughing at us.

“This is nothing serious. If it’s up to me, I will just spend a few bucks to settle this and move on to visit the tombs. Don’t waste precious time on these tiny matters.”

And so he repeated similar lines again and again, enjoying melon seeds as well as the spectacle of 8 of us standing stupidly in the shadows.

His words set off one of the old women. She started to berate us, and specifically me, brandishing her metal water flask at me: “It’s all your fault! It’s you who called the police, so we all had to wait here.” Her eyes were so angry that it looked as if she was about to eat me alive. The weasel guy was also muttering something about “settling this matter with money” on the side, all while forgetting that his strategy for negotiation involved blatant lying about what happened.

We didn’t answer their theatrics. By that time, we had already realized this standard procedure was what we should do. If it’s our car, we’d rather just settle it with a dollar amount, without even going into the trouble of talking to the insurance company, regardless of whether they lie or not. But since it’s a rental car, and since we can’t agree on simple facts, we will have to go through this boredom.

Finally, the traffic police came. There were two officers. They inspected our two vehicles for a few seconds and seemed to already know what had happened. They went straight to the rash guy.

“Dude, this is quite obvious. If you agree to what happened, we could settle everything online. If not, both of you will need to come to our police station on Monday, and we can settle it offline.” The rash guy stared at the officer; finally, he seemed to understand. And I believe it’s by that time he finally realized he didn’t have to pay anything out of his own pocket for this, but his insurance company would pay. “Oh, I never ran into a situation like this. I didn’t know what to do,” he said, with a little embarrassment on his face.

The police didn’t even bother to check the cameras, but the video footage also arrived. On the tollbooth woman’s phone, we saw clearly that there was quite a long distance between our two vehicles, and while our car stood still, it was their vehicle that was backing right into ours. But I was still intrigued by one detail: not only did the surveillance camera capture the car honking, but there were also sounds of people talking, possibly even some excited screaming.

“Who are the people screaming there? Were there people watching this camera while this accident happened?”

“It was your sound,” said the tollbooth woman.

I was shocked. Our windows were closed at that time, and there were at least 20 meters between our vehicle and the camera. To make something like this possible, the camera had to be perceptive and intelligent enough to not only target our vehicle but “pierce” it through as well. Holy s***! I didn’t know that technology is this advanced already, and frankly, even a little scared.

“Hey, you two, so this is settled. In a while, you will see the Statement on your 12123 app,” said the police officer. “It’s quite easy. If you haven’t already, just install the 12123 app, and you will see soon. Now, we need to take a picture of you two drivers.”

Thus, in front of the royal mausoleum of the Imperial Qing Court, the rash guy and Mr.G stood side by side, posing for the photo, as if they were two good old friends visiting this historical site. The scene was simply too comical, and all of us were chuckling by that time.

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The generational shift

The confused rash-faced driver, the lying old weasel, and the flask-brandishing old lady: I don’t blame these people. The way they reacted was how I would expect them to if it were 20 years ago. In that low-trust society, most of the arguments between strangers would turn into a shouting match to test whose version of truth was the loudest - and I believe that’s exactly how they intended to approach this.

But such a shouting match becomes instantly meaningless when so many corners of society, both physical and online, are being recorded all the time.

This low-trust vs. high-trust issue has a generational dimension to it. The initial offer that Y made, giving up on compensation for now but only adding friends on WeChat just in case, made sense only if this incident had happened in Shanghai or Beijing, between people of similar age. But we were not in Shanghai, and so this offer only fell on deaf ears. It was as if Y was speaking a foreign language to them.

The young vs. old dichotomy is also highly correlated with tech-savvy vs non-savvy. When the policeman asked us to install the 12123 app, the rash guy struggled. So we offered to send them a screenshot of the Statement once we saw it on our phone. And he was honest about one thing: he really never had a car accident before (and he possibly just learned how to drive). This meant he had never called his insurance company before, so he struggled here again. Thus, another comical thing happened. In the end, it was we who helped them call their insurance company, explaining how their vehicle had run into ours. It’s like outsourcing all of your own work to your counterparty in a business transaction.

The world has changed, but those old people have not. But they have carried their old instincts forward into an era when things simply don’t operate in the way that they are used to.

Technology and trust

The link between technology and trust levels is a significant topic, and is at the root of the whole controversy about the so-called “social credit score”, a mythical Orwellian system exaggerated and fantasized by so many Westerners. I don’t think I have ever opined on this topic here at China Translated, so I will briefly make a comment about it.

The “social credit score” may be one of the most poorly understood issues, given its popularity in public discourses. Born and raised in China, and living in China for the last 15 years, I have never known what my “social credit score” is, and I struggle to understand exactly what Western commentators were referring to.

My suspicion is that an authentic recent development from the last decade was taken out of its broader context and misunderstood. And that big context is this: China had an extremely low-trust society to start with. In that low-trust society, people, frantic to get rich, frequently lied and cheated, mostly to strangers, but sometimes to friends and relatives as well.

Anyone living in this kind of environment knew that the situation needed to be improved; otherwise, it would only destroy wealth and grind business transactions to a standstill.

And so in this context, many proposals were adopted to make people trust each other more. For instance, the court system now operates a blacklist system for individuals who refuse to repay their debts, called “失信人名单The List of Untrustworthy People”. The people on that blacklist are not able to make high-value spending, such as traveling by air, traveling by high-speed rail, or living in a 5-star hotel. This blacklist, together with the fact that China doesn’t have a personal bankruptcy law yet, has created deepening derivative problems for entrepreneurship. But at least there is a blacklist! Before that, if someone just refused to repay what they owed, they would have zero penalty and could go on to borrow more from other unwitting lenders.

Private internet platforms also run their own systems. Any users of Alipay and WeChat Pay will have their own Alipay and WeChat scores, calculated based on their past record of respecting obligations. When your scores are high enough, you are allowed to borrow a portable powerbank, rent a shared bike, or open the doors of a vending machine without paying any deposit, something that’s totally impossible in China 20 years ago.

Can any of these technologies be abused? It’s possible. When in 2022 during the height of Covid lockdown, many bank depositors in Henan protested about fraud at a government-affiliated bank, the local government in Henan illegally placed a “Covid red code” on those protestors thereby restricting their movement. But the backlash against it was also immediate, and instead of tempering down the incident, the “red code” episode actually helped that protest turn into a national controversy. Eventually, the public outcry was so huge that the government was even “forced” to foot the bill for depositors, something they were actually not legally obligated to do.

What the 2022 Henan bank protests showed was that the Chinese public, in general, was quite sensitive about misusing technological infrastructure, and the boundaries of what technology should or should not do are being formed.

And the same public clearly enjoys technology’s benefit. It’s understandable for the Americans to attach Orwellian connotations to technology and surveillance. After all, freedom is what Americans care about the most. But that’s not the most important thing for most Chinese people I know, who tend to place more premium on safety, freedom from theft and robbery, and freedom from being lied to their faces by random strangers.

I originally planned to finish this article about my trip itself, in the Qing tombs, the infamous robbery of Qianlong and Cixi’s tombs, and the Water Great Wall. It was an amazing weekend.

But do you wish me to bore you with that? Vote Yes if you want. I will only write about it if I gather at least 300 Yes votes.

The article is behind the paywall, and you are encouraged to pay for it, but I will summarize the core content here. According to Whipling, (whose real name is Sean Haines, a Brit who formerly worked for a TV studio of Xinhua), state media people are coming to the Substack platform in “camouflage”. Despite dutifully declaring their state affiliations, they are still not seen as sincere when they claim the newsletter only represents “my personal opinion”. Instead, according to Mr. Haines, documents from their employers, such as Xinhua, seem to suggest their operations are fully embedded in the “system”. The key example that Mr Haines cited was , or JJ, founder first of and later of . Mr. Haines cited Jiang’s publicly disclosed appearances at Tsinghua and at local thinktanks sharing about his experience running newsletters, and a now-deleted reference to him in an Xinhua article, among many other things, to insinuate his work is not trustworthy.

Per Mr. Haines’ account, those substackers do not look like humans with agency of their own, but only villainous minions commanded by some mighty dark forces. Because they are not treated as real humans, it seems that Mr. Haines hasn’t even bothered to reach out directly to any of the people he “exposed” for comments.

Throughout the essay, Mr. Haines also failed to do a proper job of providing sources for his cited content. For instance, he posted a picture of JJ giving a lecture at Tsinghua University about newsletters, but forgot to let his readers know that the picture was taken from a publicly disclosed WeChat article. To me, this looks like a deliberate act to insinuate that these are “secret” events that, while in fact they are all wide open and much more mundane than readers were led to believe.

It’s not common to see low-quality character assassination of substackers by other substackers on this platform. This floodgate, once opened, may bring many nasty things.

But let’s forget about that for now. What I want to write about today is not just the blind spots of Mr. Haines’ work. It has to do with something very personal for me. This may be the first time I publicly disclose this fact: back in 2022, I was an early co-founder of Ginger River Review as well.

Unlike Mr. Haines, who has to rely on public information and personal bias to tell this story, I have a unique, first-person view and my own blend of personal bias to tell you my story, the true story.

This is a story about how the young and enterprising generation of China, even within the confines of the state apparatus and despite difficulty in explaining themselves to either side, tried their utmost to achieve something meaningful for themselves, for their employer, for their beloved country, and for peace and understanding of the world.

I believe it will be much more fun than Mr. Haines’ work, and it’s free!

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How it started

JJ and I were in the same high school for 6 years, but I don’t think we ever talked to each other back then. We only heard each other’s names. I knew he played basketball, dark-skinned and tall. And that’s all.

After high school, one of the many things I was quite keen to organize was our high school alumni gatherings. One of the largest events at the time took place in Shanghai. JJ happened to be studying at a university in Shanghai. Ever a dependable person, he ended up taking charge of organizing the whole event. That’s when we really started to know each other, and bonded.

After college, I witnessed how JJ embarked on one of the most bizarre career paths I know. First, he was an auditor at Deloitte. And then, for whatever fluke, he ended up working with the notorious Chinese Football Association. I remember JJ once said that before CFA, he had never been abroad. But at CFA, his main job was to take youth teams to football matches around the world.

Then, to fulfill his dream to study in the US, he got into the MBA program at the Darden School of Business of UVA. During the MBA, he got into an internship at a major internet platform in China, and received a return offer there. At the time, he also got an offer from Xinhua. So by the time he graduated in Darden, he was faced with two life-changing choices that could not have been more different: a high-paying, high-stake job into the vaunted but blood-stained Colosseum that’s China’s internet, or a public sector job into the machinery of 体制tizhi - “the system”, with much lower pay, uncertain visibility in terms of career path, high chance to get bored but a non-zero chance of doing something actually meaningful.

I remember the many consultation discussions we had about the pros and cons of either choice. He was really uncertain about this decision at the time, understandably. But in the end, for a reason I don’t fully comprehend, he chose Xinhua. I would not make that choice for myself if I were him.

Fast forward to late 2021, JJ found me one day. He introduced me to the idea of a “Substack”. I was instantly fascinated by the idea and saw the potential value. By the time I had already completed my own transformation from a super-fan of Western mainstream media to someone disillusioned with it (documented here), so we discussed how we could finally use this new medium to express ourselves and to facilitate a better understanding of China from the outside world. And it wouldn’t be too hard to do, because there is already many good content in the Chinese-speaking world, so some simple translation with curation would already be very valuable.

Little did I know then, the reason JJ reached out to me was because, per his memory, I may be the very first person he knew who ever did a newsletter. I almost forgot until he brought it up, but back in my college years, I would email a digest of all the items I found interesting about China to a few hundred people I knew, by hand. So I was always “the newsletter guy” in JJ’s mind.

“Oh, so this newsletter is a real thing now?” I was incredulous.

“Yes, obviously. Quite a big deal.”

“It doesn’t make sense. If this thing is obviously so good and so needed, why are only very few people in China doing it now?” I asked further.

“I don’t know. But that’s the thing, right? Not many people are doing it.”

Almost immediately, I sensed a problem. I asked him straight away how he would present himself, given the fact that “working for state media” will discredit him in the English media. He said he would just disclose his identity. But how would Xinhua think of this, I asked further. I forgot the exact wording, but he responded with something along the lines of:

“They do not know, and I do not plan to let them for now. You know how things work in tizhi. If you ask for their permission for something new, they will never grant you the chance. Things happen because people like us make it happen. After you are successful, that’s the better time to make it known.”

“But isn’t that quite risky for you?” I asked.

“It’s damn risky. But we will not get anywhere without taking risks.”

And that’s damn right.

So we quickly assembled the team. Jiang would be the main editor and take charge of the policy section. I would be in charge of economics and finance. There was actually a third co-founder, someone also outside the tizhi just like me, who would be in charge of the culture section. But being an artist that he is, he never really contributed. So I will not name him here.

One obvious first task is to find the name for this Substack. We didn’t want to use cultural stereotypes like “panda”, “dragon”, or “forbidden city”, but wanted something edgier and quirkier, something that might not make sense at first but would be easy to remember. I believe in the end, it was my idea to translate Jiang Jiang’s Chinese name directly: 姜Ginger, 江River. We all loved this idea, but I remember JJ was hesitant for a few days. He was a bit afraid to make this project too personal. After all, he was still a Xinhua journalist. There might be unknown risks in the future. But in the end, he gave this name his full blessing.

I mainly wrote under my pseudonym (“RW”, of course) and contributed a few pieces in 2022, the first year that GRR was actually launched. Some of my proudest works were my translations of how TikTok came to be (Part 1, Part 2) and a sober essay discussing China’s political system, and a fascinating account of how China once prepared itself for the potential nuclear armageddon between us and the Soviets in the 1960s.

This last one was especially noteworthy. We deliberately published it not long after the outbreak of the Ukraine War. We tried to make a subtle point: Chinese people know who Russians really are, and we will do our best to preserve our own interests. So stop whining and stop agitating for China to take a side.

I consider GRR as a training ground for my later newsletters. For instance, an essay on China’s PE/VC industry that I translated laid the preparatory work for my No.1 popular essay on the demise of venture capital in China.

Note that all of this happened in the pre-ChatGPT age. Deepl, the best translation software at the time, was far from perfect. And most of the articles we translated were, in the words of Mr. Haines, “dense and wonky”. So it was actually quite a painful task, copying and pasting and editing and copying and pasting and editing and... I spent on average 2-3 days to complete a piece.

What made it even more difficult was that both of us only worked on this on a part-time basis. On my part, I have a full-time job. To make it worse, soon after we launched GRR, the lockdown in Shanghai happened. Life was chaotic and uncertain. Fear of hunger became real for the first time in my life.

On JJ’s part, the situation was even tougher. Much tougher. That year, he was dispatched to Xinhua’s office in Islamabad, Pakistan.

In hindsight, I don’t think he mentally prepared for the dire situation there. Precisely because the Pakistani government is extremely close to China while at the same time it’s a highly fragmented country, so separatists and terrorists like to make demands from the government by targeting, and actually killing, Chinese citizens. On the very first day JJ arrived in Pakistan, a car bomb killed 4 people in Karachi, including the director of the local Confucius Institute and 2 Chinese teachers. For JJ, working for China’s national news agency would place an especially high bounty on his head.

In our chat messages at the time, JJ said that every day, during the walk between the office and his apartment, he felt like he was constantly walking naked. Behind every burqa, every veiled face, there could be a suicide vest, and so he literally had to close his eyes while walking, alone among the crowd. To survive this daily ordeal, he had to learn how to get numb about the fact that there was a real risk that he would literally not survive this stint.

But being an entrepreneur, I know very well that it’s often when you are in the gravest danger, when you are at the lowest depth of your hopelessness, and when you are not even sure whether you will live to see tomorrow, that your true potential blossoms and real creativity flourishes.

JJ is essentially an entrepreneur too, and an in-house entrepreneur in tizhi. And like all entrepreneurs, we always believe “办法总比困难多there are always more solutions than problems, and “没有条件就创造条件, “if circumstances don’t allow, then we will try to create our own circumstances.”

So with this high spirit, with me standing on my balcony working on crappy pre-GPT translation tools while peering down the empty streets of a locked-down Shanghai, and JJ walking with eyes half closed to his office for his day-time assignments, and walking back to his apartment with eyes half closed again to work on his newsletter at night, Ginger River Review was born.

How I ended my involvement with GRR

This article was not about me, but I will still need to explain my current relationship with the project. So let me wrap up this part quickly.

GRR took off, but 2022 overall was a slow-moving train wreck that changed the trajectory of my life. Falling market demand, managerial inexperience, and drying up of funding together brought the company I worked for to the brink of collapse. At the direst moment, I contemplate the unthinkable: to become one of those rare cases where someone joined a company, worked for the company, but ultimately was compelled to take over the company. Things moved fast, deals were struck, I took on the job, fired people, and to make it even more dramatic, I almost broke my arm in a major car accident, all while a huge storm swirled outside. Endless Covid PCR tests and fears about losing the “green codes”. Pelosi visited Taiwan. The party congress. People on the streets. The capital market fell from the sky. Ultimately, that tumultuous year ended with mass infections that made the streets empty again.

I will save this story for another day. But it suffices to say I had no more capacity at all to work on GRR.

At the same time, I realized that so long as I was with GRR, I would not have complete control of my own voice. From time to time, many of my ideas were tabled because they were considered too sensitive to be associated with JJ. Being a Xinhua journalist, there are more restrictions on what JJ could write than for me. But GRR is, after all, his newsletter. (I will talk about those restrictions soon.)

But my time with GRR did not go to waste; it served as the inspiration for my next steps. In my own depth of hopelessness about the future of my company, I had a sudden epiphany of what we should do. We are in the information business. We have so much useful data. We should start a newsletter of our own!

And that’s how Baiguan was born. If you are interested in that part of the story, read here. At last, I come in a full circle. My part-time pet project of passion, combined with my main job and became the same thing.

The independence and self-censorship of newsletters written by state media employees

Coming back to JJ.

If you have made it so far in this article, the crucial question in your mind right now must be: Should I trust Jiang Jiang? What exactly is his relationship between Ginger River Review and Xinhua?

Let me share my personal opinions here on how to read those newsletters written by China’s state media employees.

The one I know the best about is Ginger River Review, since I had a personal stake during its founding. I also know somewhat about ’s and ’s , but my feeling is they are similar. Although I have not been involved in GRR since early 2023 and may not know the exact details of the arrangement between GRR and Xinhua, I am confident enough to comment on the high-level structures of it.

There are 3 parties to consider here. The first is those substackers. The second is the employers they work for. The third is you, the readers.

Let’s talk about the previous 2 parties first.

Ginger River Review, and the newsletter cohort it represents, is truly unique. When they claim they only represent their own voices and not those of Xinhua, they mean it literally. As far as I know, their exact writings are not reviewed and not approved by Xinhua, and in fact, per internal regulations, they are not allowed to represent Xinhua in their newsletters. (I will come back to this point below.)

During my time working with GRR, I was aware of no instance where Xinhua editors proofread and edited my work. Not a single word was changed or struck out. (Unlike, ironically, my experience with the New York Times.) Could JJ secretly give my work to Xinhua for approval? My personal trust in JJ aside, I don’t think that’s plausible, because I usually just hit the publish button after finishing my work. So, even just logistically, there was not enough time to go through anything.

By contrast, I was involved in some really official state media projects. The amount of editing was heavy, and it can be quite frustrating, which made me leave those projects.

You can also find evidence from the content. If you check closely at the top essays of GRR, you will find that, after so many years, GRR’s most popular article to date, by a wide margin, is one about transgender youth in China. From what I understand about state media, I don’t think that will be a topic that is actively encouraged.

Similarly, when you check Beijing Channel, you will find its frequency of updating is rather erratic. Sometimes, for many months, there is not a single issue. I sometimes joke to Liu Yang that he is too lazy. He just laughs off at this. It just doesn’t seem to me that his state media masters are behind his back, urging him to post this or that.

You can also look at Wang Zichen of fame, who really is the key figure that inspires a generation of China-based English-writing substackers, but is curiously shunned by Mr. Haines’s exposé. Back when Zichen was at Xinhua, people also said Pekingnology was a Xinhua asset. A few years ago, Zichen left Xinhua, but is still with him. What do you say now?

Certainly, working at the state media while writing on your own sets up unique boundaries that they will not touch on. And JJ has always been quite transparent about this. There was one event when Chinese substackers met with foreign diplomats, where JJ attended. That event was also referred to by Mr. Haines, but again, for whatever motives, he failed to inform his readers that the event was not a secret gathering that had to be hidden, but publicly disclosed as well.

I know what JJ said during that event, because, hey, I was there too! I was representing private sector voices. Can you spot me in the picture below? ^^

During that event, I remember one diplomat asking JJ a very good question about the extent to which he exercised self-censorship. And here was JJ’s response (again, not exact words but my own recollection):

I always try to be honest with what I can say. And I want to provide value for my readers through my analyses and translations. But I have to be frank, there are definitely some red lines that I won’t touch. Let me give you one example: if today you ask me who would be the next Foreign Minister, I would not answer. First, I don’t comment on personnel changes, because I don’t want to create trouble for my direct leaders. Although this newsletter only represents my views, I understand for many people, I am still perceived to represent Xinhua. Secondly, I really don’t know who the next Foreign Minister will be. What I do here has to be based on facts first. Although I can’t touch on any topic that I want, but I can guarantee that, as long as it’s something I sent out, it’s at least factual and can provide value.

When writing my newsletters here and at Baiguan, I also exercise some self-censorship. (I talk in great detail about this here.) But if I can draw some circles on a piece of paper, my boundary of self-censorship (when it comes to China) is larger than JJ’s, but not as large as someone who lives overseas.

But in any case, we are frank and open about this topic, unlike, ironically, many who work in Western media who do self-censorship too, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes on a massive scale, but pretend they are not.

To me, self-censorship is totally understandable and is nothing to be ashamed of. Because ultimately, if you are not someone who completely indulges in your ego, you are always writing for someone else. Yes, you are writing for yourself, but you are also writing for someone else. Those “someone else” are your readers, your subscribers, your clients. What your readers like or don’t know will invariably make you think twice about writing or not writing about something. Understanding who a publication’s clients are is the crucial first step to start reading any publication.

“Jiang Jiang” studio

In my opinion, the most damning piece of attack from Mr. Haines’ essay, which could cause actual concern, was this line he quoted from a deleted sentence from an article by Xinhua:

“The "Jiang Jiang Studio", which operates English newsletters with elite subscribers in the United States and the West as the main target audience, is hatched from the external department of Xinhua News Agency,”

That sentence was later deleted, but was found by Mr. Haines from the internet archives. The original article could be found here. (Again, Mr. Haines failed to provide the link.)

JJ confirmed to me that his name was once there, and it was deleted later. However, several dozen “studios” are still listed there.

Mr. Haines cited this as a key piece of evidence that GRR was not independent. But if the law of least friction applies, shouldn’t it be interpreted as major evidence that GRR is, in fact, quite different from others? After all, why haven’t they deleted the other several dozen studios there?

More importantly, as JJ also confirmed to me, that line about himself was deleted after he requested it. To me, the most plausible reason a low-ranking journalist can have the power to ask state media to delete a line is that, it is just not true. Some of his colleagues may have either misunderstood the situation or possibly tried to take the credit.

I asked JJ further about what a “studio” is. The understanding that I have got is that there are at least two kinds of studios. Here is JJ’s full response:

At other studios, they operate publicly under the title of a Xinhua News Agency reporter, meaning everything they do represents Xinhua as an organization. But my studio is just a name — it exists in name only so that I can keep doing what I’m doing now. I cannot represent Xinhua News Agency as a reporter to the outside world; I can only represent myself.

JJ’s explanation, combined with my overall impression of working with GRR, reminds me of the early days of China’s reform and opening-up period. Students of the history of China’s 1980s must know the concept of “乡镇企业Township and village enterprises”, or TVEs.

As China transitioned from a socialist command economy to a market economy, for a period, ownership rules were very opaque. But private entrepreneurs had already started to exist. To protect themselves in a country where private ownership was nominally abolished, they would have to get creative. That’s when TVEs were born.

By law, TVEs were public enterprises under the purview of local governments, but in essence, they were run by private entrepreneurs themselves. During that transition period, TVEs actually became the backbone of China’s economy, and only naturally phased away when the market economy became more mature and there was no need for them.

“Studios” like that of Jiang Jiang, in my eyes, are exactly like this. It’s an internal experiment, launched by risk-takers who are inspired by a sense of mission and ambition to achieve something valuable. If they succeed, they might usher in a new paradigm. If they fail, they will only have themselves to blame.

And it’s not easy. They carry chains around themselves. I’d say their heaviest chain, by far, is this “sandwiched” position between 2 different sets of “clients” at the same time.

I run a real business, so I know very well that serving different people at the same time is a big, big no-go for any decision. But as a state media “TVE”, they had to serve two client groups at the same time. They have to provide value for external clients, but in the meantime, they also have indirect “internal clients”, in the form of their bosses, colleagues, and, very importantly, competing agencies.

Their studios do not serve those internal clients directly, but in the same way a TVE cannot contradict the government authority, those “studios” can’t contradict their own parent organization either. For a high-profile project like GRR, those “internal clients” are watching. They may not look for results, and they do not need to give any instructions, but rest assured, they will keep watching for mistakes. One misstep would easily cause the death of someone’s career. I think anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation of any kind can instantly understand what I mean here.

But the obligation to simultaneously “serve” internal clients puts them at a major disadvantage while serving external clients. For one thing, they are not very free to speak out for themselves when they are openly and personally attacked.

So their chains are quite heavy. But again, for us entrepreneurs, who are free of chains anyway? In fact, if there are no chains, what do entrepreneurs “entrepreneur” about? And what do entrepreneurs say? “If circumstances don’t allow, then we will try to create our own circumstances.”

How to read their content

In this context, attacking those semi-independent studios like that of JJ is akin to attacking TVEs and refusing to work with them in the 1980s, just because they are, on paper, socialist entities, and by doing so, the attacker could actually become the murderers (or at least the accomplices) who kill the babies in their cribs.

Does this sound fair to you? Does this sound smart to you? Not even a minute is spent on inspecting what those TVEs are actually doing?

And this comes to the biggest trouble I find with Mr. Haines’ work: throughout the article, it’s all character assassination and guilty-by-association. None of the writing actually touches on whether there is any factual problem with GRR or other studios’ work. It’s a classic case of “viewpoints over facts”. For someone like me who was born and raised in a post-Soviet society, I can easily spot these kinds of Red Guard tactics. 你们不就是想把人搞脏搞臭么？

And this finally comes down to the final actor in this trilogy: you, the readers.

What do you care?

I don’t know about you. But for me, when I read Substacks, I care first and foremost about what new information I can get.

If a newsletter provides the useful information I need, then I subscribe. If it doesn’t, then I unsubscribe.

The affiliation of the substacker is very important to know, and I demand that all newsletter writers that I subscribe to make full disclosure about that. I demand to know whether a publication is funded by or written by anyone working for any organization, be it Xinhua, CGTN, or, for that matter, CIA, NED, Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, and so on. (If you don’t already, I urge you to do it as soon as possible, because I will not be merciful if I become aware of non-disclosure.)

This information about the affiliated organization will serve as the rough outlines of what a publication cannot say, so I will always take their content with a grain of salt. But that piece of information is enough for me already. I do not need to know, and I do not care about the specifics.

So when I read GRR, or Beijing Channel, or Inside China, here is what I know and what I am looking for: I know they have more self-censorship than I do. So there are things they might otherwise have said, but won’t say. However, I also know they are among the most accessible as well as the most flexible sources within the official system, so there may be content that the official channels may not be comfortable saying, yet they are allowed to say. This is a great tool for understanding where the wind blows for policy changes. And it’s already enough for me. I cherish them for this reason.

We are all adults. We should always use our own judgment to decide whether to read something or not, subscribe to a newsletter, or unsubscribe. We do not like 爹味 people dictating to us what to read.

Simone came to me with very thoughtful questions regarding my two essays, How important is "Century of Humiliation" in China? and "I am against CCP, not against Chinese people" - How meaningful is this idea?

He just published my response in his newsletter to tens of thousands of subscribers. Below is a reprint. I have the sense that many of you may want to ask me similar questions, so I hope this Q&A will help you further understand my viewpoints.

Simone: Regarding your post on the “Century of Humiliation,” it brought a lot to mind, including my own recollection of Xi Jinping's phrase. Perhaps because that speech resonates with many Chinese analysts, I always thought it was a widely used term. You, however, talk about the power of images. Could you tell me what specific images come to your mind when you think of that period?

Robert: There are many images, faces, events, and of course, terms associated with the collective memory of that period. If you haven't, I recommend you watching a highly-acclaimed TV drama called Towards the Republic走向共和 (here the original version, here with eng subtitles), which documented the period between the 1895 defeat to the Japanese, obliterating the entire Qing Navy and ceding Taiwan as a result, to the failed Hundred Days' Reform, to the Boxer Rebellion, all the way to the fall of Qing Dynasty. It's about how generations of intellectuals tried to right the course but failed, and how the stubborn, dim-witted ruling class wasted so much time and eventually pushed the nation to ruins.

Starting from the 20th century, images became more concrete as camera technologies developed. A lot revolved between China and Japan. The Mukden Incident in 1931 (in China it's remembered "918") when China simply gave away Manchuria to Japan without even fighting, the meat-grinding Battle of Shanghai which consumed almost all of the elite Chinese forces, the horrific Massacre of Nanjing, were among the many images that were stuck deep in China's collective memories, constantly reminding people what bottomless "humiliation" there might have if we were weak.

Simone: You rightly point out that you experienced the sensation of using a Western-derived phrase to describe the West, only to discover it was a Chinese formulation. This tells us a lot about the narrative constructions on both sides. Is there a similar "Century of Humiliation"-like narrative emerging in China today, but applied to Western nations?

Robert: As of now, I can't pinpoint any specific term or narrative from the top of my head. Perhaps I myself am trapped in my own constructed narrative, and I need someone to point it out for me.

However, there are general misconceptions stemming from using one's framework to understand the other side as well in China. For instance, Chinese people tend to understand foreign behaviors in purely materialistic and pragmatic terms, because that's who Chinese people are. I still remember that back in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, every commentator of the episode in China was frankly quite puzzled and asked each other, why? Eventually, they united in their view that Bush just wanted oil.

I believe oil was part of the calculation, but it's also plausible that many elites in America's war machine genuinely believe that, with the energy of a missionary and in the fashion of Lawrence of Arabia, they could spread democracy and freedom to the Iraqis and help engineer a great nation. But this is not something an average Chinese mind will comprehend.

Likewise, Westerners pointing fingers at China (some may be well-intentioned and well-founded) will naturally lead to a knee-jerk response: What extortion are you looking for today?

With that said, the emergence of Trumpism in the US seems like a great justification for this materialistic worldview, and will make it even further entrenched. And I am increasingly less sure that this is actually a biased view, but not an incisive understanding of the hard facts beneath the soft surface. You can almost imagine a small genie talking in an average Chinese head: those Westerners might sound nice and fancy a while ago, but eventually, they will dispatch someone like Trump to come for extortions!

Simone: I'm convinced that China doesn't aim for global leadership and isn't an expansionist power, and I believe some narratives, like the "Century of Humiliation," inadvertently contribute to the opposite perception. From a Western perspective, where should we look to find evidence supporting my conviction, especially if we're not living in China?

Robert: As I mentioned above, China does not have this kind of missionary energy to spread its way of life to the whole world. We just don't care. This indifference inherently limits global leadership ambitions. As I mentioned in my article, the memories of national humiliation are usually discussed in China within the context of self-improvement and the urge not to fall behind, rather than taking revenge.

I think the right question to ask is, had China been an expansionist power in the style of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany, what would China have done?

Everyone says that the government plays a central role in China. So what's the government saying about this? The Chinese government has a 5-year plan, which makes rough guidelines for the path of development for the next 5 years. I challenge anyone to find chapters where they talk about how to subjugate other nations. The Communist Party has a party congress every 5 years, a central committee plenum once or twice a year, and several politburo meetings several times a year. I challenge anyone to find preparations for global hegemony in any of their readouts.

That's not to say there are no elements of nationalism and even ultra-nationalism on the rise, but there are many instances of these types of voices being snuffed out by the authorities. I documented one story last year.

Is the lack of official rhetoric for expansionism just subterfuge? Is there any hidden agenda? But I have to remind you that in a system like China's, there is no way that China is on a path of "expansionism" if the political leaders do not advocate for it, do not mobilize the support for it, and even actively clamp down on it.

Simone: The prevailing Western narrative about China still carries echoes of "Orientalism." How can we, as observers and communicators, avoid falling into essentialism—the idea that "Chinese people are just like that because they're Chinese, full stop"? I ask this because I try to explain China to audiences in Italy, and I find it incredibly challenging to do so without resorting to essentialist views, while instead trying to place China within a global context.

Robert: Seeing is believing. It's hard to explain what a rhino looks like for anyone who has never seen one. They might eventually just draw a unicorn for you.

So my own recommendation is to pick your own audience. I like explaining China to those who already have some interactions with China, even better, have been to China for a considerable amount of time, and even spoken the language.

For those who have not "seen", if I have to explain, I would use as many stories and anecdotes as possible, to try my best to construct a virtual environment where the audience can almost "see". But that's extremely difficult.

Simone: On a related note, you mention Confucius in your writings. Don't you think that emphasizing too much the idea that "China acts this way because it's Confucian" could also be a form of Orientalism, especially given that the Chinese leadership's own narrative might, to some extent, reinforce this? In other words, aren't we often at risk of a response that inadvertently validates and incorporates a stereotype?

I did mention Confucius in my writings, but I believe I never claimed that it's the dominant consideration or the only thing that matters, even though it is an important building block of modern China.

The problem is not that we use this word, but that, do people actually understand what this word means? Does it just mean "conformist"? Absolutely not. At least it has way more meanings than that.

I have a theory which I will expand on in the future, that the modern Chinese state rests on at least 3 pillars: market economy, socialism, and Confucian ethics. The three are at least equally important, but the Confucian part is less accessible and less familiar to Western ears than the previous 2 pillars.

Behind this word, there are many meanings. It's important to understand the details, not just use a word as an essentialist label. I won't be able to explain everything in this answer, but let me just give you one example. In Confucian ethics, the powerful in high office are expected to provide and to literally work their asses off for the masses. In this sense, power is not pre-ordained from heaven, nor self-selecting. It's based on an invisible rating card carried by people, and by history. This simple idea will have many implications, and I will give you an example in your question below about "regime".

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Simone: Moving on to another of your impactful posts, you argue that the sentiment of "I'm not against the CCP, but I'm with the Chinese people" is not particularly meaningful and has significant limitations. Could you please briefly summarize your argument on this point?

Robert: My core idea is that the Chinese people, Chinese culture, and Chinese values serve as the ultimate breeding ground of the Communist Party of China, and there are a lot more shared interests, shared aspirations, and common ways of doing things than differences between the Party and the Nation, than the Western discourses imagine. Most of the things you love or hate about the Chinese people, you will love or hate about the CPC as well, and vice versa. This makes the common refrain "I'm not against the CCP, but I'm with the Chinese people" both logically meaningless and practically irrelevant.

Simone: I find myself in agreement with many of your points. However, stepping beyond Rubio's initial premise, if it's true that both the leadership and the people desire a prosperous China, just like in the West, do you not perceive a fundamental issue with the methods employed? I'm thinking specifically about the economy: I'm not sure if I'm just encountering a pessimistic segment of the population here in China, but it seems to me that the leadership's narrative of "everything is fine" doesn't quite align with the perceptions of many ordinary Chinese citizens.

Robert: There are a lot of debates about "methods". And the debate is lively domestically as well. Sometimes the debate surfaces in the public sphere, most of the time intense debates are happening in private.

The "everything is fine" rhetoric is a controversial one. The party and state apparatus, like any big institution (such as any large corporation), has the natural tendency to paint a rosier picture and say "everything is fine". Can it look dumb sometimes, when not everything is fine? Yes. Can it be improved? I think so. I always urge better transparency, honesty, and better skills at doing this. Still, it's not mid-level people's job to be skillful at effective and transparent public communication that sometimes involves the admission of errors. Ultimately, it will depend a lot on the style and character of the top leadership. Sometimes we have this style in our top leadership, sometimes we don't.

But up till now, we have only been talking about "narratives" here. But between "words" and "deeds", which one should you pay more attention to? Between a government that talks smoothly but never delivers the results, and a government that talks clumsily but prefers to deliver the results behind the scenes, which one is exactly better?

Some more context is needed here. Is the economy doing fine in China? You can't talk about "good" or "bad" without reference to your comparison. Compared with, say, 5 or 10 years ago, it's noticeable that we are at least at a "down" time, and it's natural for some of your friends to feel pessimistic. But that's only after we have experienced perhaps the fastest and most impactful economic growth in human history. People are just underwhelmed when the energy level goes down a notch. Also, compared with the rest of the world right now, how is the Chinese economy actually doing? I believe it's not an exaggeration to say it's "above average" right now.

Also, sometimes I wonder whether China is unfairly biased in this regard, just because it's China. For instance, just now the US Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) announced the July 2025 nonfarm payroll data, which the May and June estimates were dramatically downward revised by a whopping 90%. Soon afterward, Trump fired the head of the BLS. Had events of such a magnitude happened in China - both the dramatic revisions of data as well as summary firing of civil servants to help paint a rosy picture - I could not imagine the kind of uproar that could have happened.

Simone: From the perspective of someone trying to explain China to a Western audience, how would you explain the fact that the majority of Chinese people generally support the leadership, especially considering that the word "China" in Western media is often associated with "regime," implying a coerced form of support?

Robert: The prevailing mental framework in the West to understand the government is this "government vs people" framework. In this framework, the two are distinct from each other and are inherently adversarial. If one applies this mental work to understand China, for sure you will see the Chinese system as a "regime", and it's nothing but coercion that fuses people together. How else can the ruling party stay on forever without an election of sorts?

Yet it's just one mental framework. Not everything in the world needs to conform to one framework. I used to understand China with this framework too, and saw problems everywhere. But later, I found that most people here actually don't have this framework. Instead, their mental framework is more like a "parents-children" relationship. Yes, in a family setting, parents decide, and children obey. But parents have obligations for children too, and are expected to make good and wise decisions for the benefit of children. If parents keep making bad choices that harm their children, people will say they are not good parents.

Children also know that their parents provide them with the ultimate protection. Chinese police, especially those at the neighborhood level, have a busy schedule, because they are expected to deal with all sorts of obligations. For example, when neighbors get into a quarrel, they often just call the police to help settle disputes. In China, we will also not debate about whether the government should cut funding for disaster relief, as the US is doing for FEMA, because disaster relief is the least a "parental" government is expected to provide, and it is expected to be provided at all costs.

(For me personally, I would prefer "children" to grow up more and be more mature. The children need to grow up eventually.)

So, how to understand popular support for the "regime"? So long as the government fulfills its "parental" duty to provide basic safety, food, and shelter for the "children", even with a bit of coercion, I see no way the children will just willfully tear down the house. And when it does happen, it will be a massive fight, a fight between fathers and sons, and you will instantly and unquestionably know when it happens. Today is just not that day.

Simone: Finally, I'd be grateful if you could share a bit about your professional activities and current work.

Robert: I run a data and research company called BigOne Lab, providing data subscription services for institutional investors and corporate decision-makers around the world. Besides China Translated, which is my personal newsletter, my company also runs a newsletter called Baiguan, which provides data-driven insights to help readers stay up-to-date on Chinese business and economy.

The professional data and research industry in China, where we operate, is a fascinating industry. I also keep a small newsletter called Paid Sub to update you about this industry. I am currently planning a major project for this industry, and I hope to make announcements for it in a few months.

To be clear, without being reminded, I know exactly what this term refers to: roughly a century of humiliation, unequal treaties, wars, and suffering when China was weak, stretching from the 1840 Opium War all the way to (arguably) the end of WWII.

What I mean is that I struggled to find the corresponding Chinese phrase that is as popular in China as the “Century of Humiliation” in the West. The fact that I struggled here, while many of you might assume an average Chinese person should instantly know the corresponding phrase, is a telling sign that I wish to explore in this essay.

To be fair, this phrase does exist in China. After some research (but only after some research), you can find it somewhere. For instance, in Xi Jinping’s 2015 speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, he said:

The victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was a triumph for the entire Chinese nation. It not only completely shattered Japanese militarism’s attempt to colonize and enslave China, but also abolished the unequal treaties signed with imperialist powers since modern times, allowing China to wash away a century of national humiliation. This marked a major turning point in history—never again would China return to the era of repeated defeats in the face of foreign invasions. The victory laid a solid foundation for China's independence and liberation, established a historic turning point for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and provided the essential precondition for its realization.

中国人民抗日战争的胜利，是整个中华民族的胜利。它不仅彻底粉碎了日本军国主义殖民奴役中国的图谋，而且废除了近代以来与列强签订的不平等条约，使中国得以洗雪百年国耻。历史因此而发生重大转折，近代以来中国人民抗击外来侵略屡战屡败的历史一去不复返了！抗日战争的胜利，为中国的独立和解放奠定了坚实基础，为实现中华民族伟大复兴确立了历史转折点，提供了根本前提。

But sheer existence does not mean significance. In the speech above, Xi Jinping used the word “百年国耻”, which literally translates as “A century of national humiliation/shame.” But this is not a very famous phrase, at least not in contemporary China. A more often cited one is “百年屈辱 A century of disgrace/humiliation”. And another phrase that I hear much, much more often than these two is “勿忘国耻 Never forget national humiliation”.

What’s even more noteworthy is that it’s not those phrases that make up the bulk of contemporary Chinese imagination of that period. It’s the imagery. While Westerners may refer to this period with a single phrase, the Chinese think of this period in terms of images. It’s the image of Qing officials signing unequal treaties with the British in Nanjing and with the Japanese at Shimonoseki. It’s the image of the Summer Palace on fire. It’s the image of the Qing Navy destroyed. It’s the image of Versailles, which demanded that China cede Shandong to Japan. It’s the image of September 18, 1931, when Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshall, effectively gave away Manchuria to the Japanese without firing a shot. It’s the image of the total destruction of China’s best-equipped armed forces in the Battle of Shanghai across the river from colonial quarters, where Western revelers live their lives as usual by stark contrast. It’s the image of severed heads and mutilated bodies in Nanjing in 1938.

“Century of Humiliation”, as an English term, is a catch-all phrase that’s designed to contain all of these images above and serve as a framework of explanation for the motivations of modern-day China. But I have to say, though, this phrase appears much more (perhaps 100 times more, even 1000 times more) frequently in Western discourse of China than it does in actual China. The Chinese economy is developing rapidly? They are responding to the Century of Humiliation. The Chinese government mandates a strong industrial policy? This is because they are thinking about the Century of Humiliation. China is having border disputes? They want to avenge the Century of Humiliation, of course!

I asked around a bit about the origin of the popularity of “Century of Humiliation” in the West, but haven’t received a satisfactory answer yet. Maybe one of you could help me here. (Regarding “勿忘国耻” though, someone told me Wang Zheng’s 2012 book Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations was influential for those in Anglophone academia who study the historical memory of modern Chinese history.)

At this stage, it seems to me that the English term “Century of Humiliation” has all the hallmarks of a linguistic device found and popularized by Western intellectuals themselves to encapsulate their own understanding of China, and then took the central stage in the discourse environment.

Similar things happen in reverse, too, and Chinese scholars are not immune to this practice either. For example, when I wrote the piece discussing Ne Zha 2, and there was a paragraph where I discussed the differences in historical political systems between China and Europe. There, I tried to invoke a line that many high schoolers in China learned from textbooks about the fundamental feature of the old feudal system of Europe:

“The lord of my lord is not my lord, the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.领主的领主不是我的领主，附庸的附庸不是我的附庸.”

To research for that piece, I tried to find the original text from the West about this line. Only that I couldn’t, and to my great surprise, my AI told me it seemed that the line was coined by some Chinese scholars(!)

In both “Century of Humiliation” and “Lord of my lord is not my lord”, the observing side tries to understand the observed side by creating simple abstractions. But this “observer-imposed abstraction” in turn becomes the reality that the observers live in.

We should always be mindful of these oversimplified, manufactured realities that we create. At least when it comes to the “Century of Humiliation” narrative, I can see there are at least three major perils associated with it.

First, it trivializes the experience of the observed side. There is a whole body of rich experiences and real human emotions that can also point to many different directions. All these details are lost: Oh, so that’s Century of Humiliation. I got it!

The more obvious problem is that fixation on a single phrase also runs the risk of over-representing what it actually is. There is no denying that the images and memories represented by “Century of Humiliation” are a key component of the modern Chinese mind, a key building block of modern Chinese nationhood, and a lot of our actions and choices today are responding to these memories. But it’s not the only building block. It’s not even the most important building block. Contemporary Chinese people live in a far, far more complex world, and our mental worlds juggle between personal dreams, familial duties, self-growth, material desires, entertainment, aspirations for a just and fair society, curiosity, over-competition, safety, personal well-being, memories of Confucian doctrine, memories of cosmopolitanism like that of the Tang as well as memories of both brotherly camaraderie as well as unscrupulous scheming like that from the Romance of Three Kingdoms -- all alongside our unconscious response to the “Century of Humiliation”, which is but one page in our recent history.

Finally, this narrative and over-representation will blow the fear of it out of proportion. I can vaguely sense that the Western world fixates so much on this term because of fear: fear of China rising and eventually taking revenge for the West’s past crimes.

A lot of the discussion of China by the West serves more like a mirror for the West to look at itself, a recurring theme in this newsletter.

For instance, when I discussed that many Western intellectuals seem to assume China would be an externally aggressive power because China has an authoritarian system, I wrote:

In the case of China, our system is authoritarian (or patriarchal), but decidedly not expansionist. Sometimes, I think the Western intellgentsia has often projected their own worst fear - the fear total loss of liberty under an authoritarian system - onto China to extrapolate that China will extend its not-so-inspiring governance model to other people. In fact, we worry too much about internal disorders to care about others, and we are not interested in converting others into our way of life at all. (There was projection of another kind of fear, a fear of other people repeating the same crimes Western predecessors did. They assumed that since the West rose through colonialism and plunder, then China probably will repeat the same path.)

A few weeks ago, when discussing why China would refrain from meddling in the Israel-Iran War, I wrote:

China is neither plotting to take over the world, nor does it care about claiming some kind of leadership role. For those of you who believe otherwise, I find that you are often projecting yourself onto understanding China. You are only looking at yourself in the mirror here.

In the case of “Century of Humiliation”, I find most of its advocates are looking into the mirror again. Behind the repeated chanting of this term, I can see a real fear that China would use history as an excuse to ask for reparations.

Asking for reparations may be the natural urge under the Western-style framework that’s more based on reciprocity, contract, and exactitude. Within such a framework, it made perfect sense, for example, for the British and French to ask for hundreds of billions of gold marks in reparations from Germany in the Treaty of Versailles (It would make zero sense to a Chinese mindset).

If Chinese people think like the West, then yes, you should be very careful here, because we are coming after you! But that’s not how we think about things. When Chinese pupils learn the lessons about that “Century”, the focus is not about “we should get stronger and finally kick those Western oppressors in their asses!” The focus is always clear and much more reactive, and is well represented by a much, much more widely used phrase:“落后就要挨打 Backwardness will invite aggression”.

Notice the framing of this idea. We do not talk about any desire to oppress others when we are strong, but only about the need not to be oppressed when we are weak. Power becomes a means to defend, rather than a tool to offend. And the “Century of Humiliation”, whatever it means, becomes a perpetual reminder for self-growth as well as a dark warning for non-growth, rather than a call to arms for revenge.

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On top of the trench warfare in Ukraine, unending deaths and struggles in Gaza, a historic air combat between two nuclear powers with a combined population of 1.6 billion people, we now have another major war in the Middle East that has already decimated the majority of the Iranian military’s top brass. From the Adriatic all the way to Kashmir, the heartland of Eurasia is embroiled in chaos and bloodshed. Even Trump’s ill-advised trade war seems forgotten by many.

With the world in flames, China seems like a safe harbor. In my social media feeds, I see no lack of people, even liberal-minded ones, cherishing the kind of peace and stability we currently enjoy. Our waters are calm, the world’s suffering distant, and even if we occasionally see it on short videos, with a few swipes, it’s gone.

Some people are baffled: Why is China not doing more to join the fray?

It’s true that China has a closer and warmer relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran than many countries, especially in the West, to the point that for the China hawks sitting in DC, China is unquestionedly (but absurdly) put together with Russia, Iran, and North Korea as the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” grouping.

If China is really such an “Axis” power, shouldn’t China already weigh in by now, lending strong and tangible military support to the Ayatollah? If not sending some troops to the Persian Gulf directly, at least creating some troubles in the Asian waters will help Iran relieve some pressure?

Instead, apart from offering some words of condemnation against Israel, China has done nothing of the sort, nor is there any such plan at all.

Naturally, such aloofness frustrates both the kind of warmongers who view China as Darth Vader…

… as well as those who think of China as an angel standing for moral leadership, alike:

To be sure, China is not an ally of Iran. In fact, the official Chinese policy is to be a military ally with no one, and the country with which China has some sort of NATO-like arrangement is exactly ZERO.

China is neither plotting to take over the world, nor does it care about claiming some kind of leadership role. For those of you who believe otherwise, I find that you are often projecting yourself onto understanding China. You are only looking at yourself in the mirror here.

So what does China want?

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Forgive me for using an analogy with Game of Thrones again. It’s just such a great story with both Western and Eastern wisdom inside, and a good analogy will serve your understanding rather than a bad one.

The last time I used the GoT analogy, I wrote:

I always feel that "Game of Thrones" is like a metaphor for the 21st century. While dragons (China) and Westeros families (the West) fight for the Iron Throne, winter is creeping on all of us, unnoticed by those caught in the game. Winter is coming.

In retrospect, I made a grave mistake in seeing the Dragon Queen as an analogy for China. The United States may well be King Robert Baratheon, strong and martial, handsome and charming when he was a young man, and still powerful enough today to weld together the Seven Kingdoms with fire and steel, but his power is visibly waning.

To the US, China is the Dragon Queen, young, rising, with a birthright inheriting from a long historical tradition, vengeance in the heart, and an ever-growing army across the Ocean that must be strangled in its crib.

But he is wrong. China is not Daenerys Stormborn. He gets the wrong adversary.

Sure, China is rising and getting stronger. Sure, the Chinese people believe strongly that they are meant to be strong because they have been the world’s preeminent power many times. Sure, China has some historical grievances. But the crucial difference between China’s dragons and those of the Dragon Queen is that those historical grievances serve more as a reminder to self-cultivate, rather than a call to arms to subjugate the West in retaliation.

And the most important difference is that, while Dragon Queen sets her eye on the Iron Throne across the sea, China has no such interests.

China is not the Dragon Queen. Instead, China is the Iron Bank.

Like the Iron Bank, China is looking to be a global financier, supporting infrastructure buildout around the world, with credit lines ultimately backed by its ever-growing material wealth and productivity.

Like the Iron Bank, China couldn’t care less who is fighting whom in your own backyard. To whomever is open to doing business with China, and not hostile to China’s commercial interests, China opens its arms.

Russia is fighting Ukraine, and you are accusing China of supporting Russia by trading with the Russians? Well, in the counter next door, the Iron Bank is trading with Ukraine as well, like this tweet by :

“Robert, you keep saying China is not war-like, but what about China’s neighbors? What about all those border issues in the South China Sea?”

This line of inquiry is weakened by the day when compared with all the killings in the world right now. Those water cannon skirmishes and boat rammings, but no shots fired and no missiles launched, resulting in not a single life lost (apart from one finger from a Filipino sailor), suddenly look extremely civil to the world, don't they?

, a fellow Substacker and former Chief Editor of SCMP recently wrote that, thanks to Trump, US threat of a ‘peaceful evolution’ recedes for China:

As American beliefs and values, once aptly described as of “a city upon a hill”, have lost their lustre, Trump’s declaration that the US is done nation-building and intervening could not have come at a more opportune moment for China.

I’d argue that the growing conflict and wars around the world are in some way another “gift” for China. As time goes by, and as China consciously stays away from conflicts around the world, more people will start to appreciate the “Iron Bank power” that China truly is.

China is not going to be another global hegemon as an alternative to the US, but it will probably still present an alternative world order, in which the No.1 power on the stage is nothing but a merchant-banker.

Lack of principles? Lack of moral leadership? Perhaps. But between a world where people stuck to their own principles kill each other, and a world where people trade with each other in peace, which one will you choose?

The global capital market is certainly taking notice. 2025 marks the year when the “uninvestable” label for Chinese assets was buried for good, not least because of the backdrop of global chaos. Renminbi, the Chinese currency, is gradually appreciating. And despite the trade war and a domestic economy that’s still far from full recovery, the stock index in Hong Kong, where most of the China-bound international investors park their precious cargo, has returned an impressive 20%+ year to date.

Welcome to the Iron Bank. The door is always open for the good traders among you.

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We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into this global order. And they took advantage of all its benefits. But they ignored all its obligations and responsibilities. Instead, they have lied, cheated, hacked, and stolen their way to global superpower status, at our expense.

When Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska later asked him, “Do you believe the PRC is the biggest threat we face as the United States?” Rubio also took the extra pains to make the distinction:

Uhh, the Communist Party of China, [which] leads the PRC, is the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.

A clear distinction between the Communist Party of China, or CPC, and the country it leads has been a key feature of US policy imagination towards China. It is a common belief that the CPC and China are two distinct entities, just like the Republican Party and the USA are two distinct entities, and America’s real threat is the Party, not China as a country, nor the Chinese people. So it’s no surprise that the main congressional platform on China is not called the China Committee, but instead the “Select Committee on the CCP”. And when Secretary Rubio said he would “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas recently, the emphasis was also supposedly on those with connections to the CPC.

And it’s not just the US government, but a belief commonly held by the absolute majority of America’s elites. For instance, after podcaster ’s seemingly first-ever trip to China, he had already started to opine about his advice on how the US should manage China’s rise:

In China, liberal pro-Western voices are often censored or shouted down. If I was the US President, and I wanted to win hearts and minds in China, here's what I'd do. In every single speech where I'm talking about China, I'd make a conspicuous effort to complement Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture. I'd talk about how my Chinese staffers are the smartest and most hardworking people I've ever worked with (which honestly is probably true). I'd talk about how much my daughter is obsessed with ancient Chinese dresses. I'd talk about how I'm learning Mandarin in my free time, and have a live "Aw shucks" conversation in Mandarin.

The obvious problem, with Mr. Patel’s strategy, as well as that of Secretary Rubio, that of Senator Ricketts, of Mike Gallagher, of Matt Pottinger, of the House Committee on the CCP, and of almost the entirety of US establishment is that, they seem have never entertained the idea that, maybe, just maybe, it’s exactly the same “Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture” that serves as the birthplace, the breeding ground, the source of power and the unending nourishment for the might and vigor of the Communist Party of China, and that separating the CPC in its current form from the nationhood of Chinese people is a logically and logistically impossible task.

This obsession of an idea stems from a long-standing Western framework of understanding the world, pitting people against the government, as if the two are an inherent adversary against each other. The “Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture”, however, do not necessarily share this worldview.

In this essay, I will look at the extent to which the usual refrain that “I am only against the CPC, not China” argument is meaningful or not.

Please note that I focus on meaningfulness, not right or wrong. I do not want to pass value judgment here and pay less attention to what it should be. Each one of us is entitled to our own value system, and we may all have merits in our values. Instead, my sole focus will be on what it is, and whether the theory and strategy of “CPC vs. China” can actually achieve its intended outcome. If you genuinely care about the usefulness of an idea, please read on. But if you only think your own belief to be the sole truth, I suggest you stop reading immediately.

I am also mindful that this is a highly controversial topic. For many times, I have been variously labeled a “paid shill”, a “CCP apologist”, a “propagandist”, and “co-opted by the CCP”. I completely disagree with these ill-intentioned and ill-informed characterizations, but I suppose writing this piece will only exacerbate the situation for me.

But just as I have stated before, if I have to adhere to an ideology, my only ideology will be the “ideology of facts”, above everything else. If being wrongly accused is the cost of getting facts straight for more people, then so be it.

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Part I. The merits of “CPC vs. China”

Any convincing, serious critique of an idea won’t work without seeing its merits. An idea that’s as widespread and as potent as this one would not exist without some elements of truth.

The “CPC vs. China” theory is true in two important aspects, where the goals of the CPC and of China may diverge in meaningful ways.

Merit #1: CPC wants to stay in power, but the Chinese people have no power plans

Now, this is not only true, but by definition, it will be true forever, simply because a political party and a nation are two distinct concepts with distinct properties.

CPC is a political party. Every political party wants to grab power and to stay in power. If given the chance, every political party, be it the Democrats, the Conservatives, the PAP, or the LDP, would want to stay in power forever. A political party should not exist if it doesn’t want to win power and hold on to power, just as a corporation should not exist if it doesn’t want to make profits.

The Chinese people, on the other hand, are fundamentally indifferent to this. The people only want to mind their own business, live their lives, and prosper.

It’s not impossible that CPC’s desire to hold on to power will one day conflict with Chinese people’s desire to live a happy life. Although there were no political parties in China’s ancient history, there were dynasties, and dynasties usually failed when they failed to provide for their people, either because people were too starving or protection against external invaders failed.

But these moments of “divergence” happened very occasionally, during only the most extreme times, and happened on average once every three hundred years. It’s possible that this divergence will happen one day during CPC’s rule. But, to be honest, any seasoned reader of Chinese history knows that today is not that day.

Moreover, when Westerners are talking about a political party’s obsession to remain in power, they always seem to harbour a kind of cynicism that “power” is an end in itself, not a means to achieve something else. This is understandable in the Western context, where every politician can only hold on to his/her office for just a few years. (Or, in the case of Liz Truss, just a few weeks.) After the inauguration, there will soon be a midterm, and soon after that, the campaign to re-elect will begin all over again. Most of the energy is devoted to getting power, with little left to actually govern.

It is true that CPC would want to stay in power, and it’s safe to say that staying in power is the pre-requisite goal of the CPC before everything else. After all, any living organism has to survive first before thinking of anything else. But to think that staying in power is the only goal of the CPC completely misses the mark. In the system that the CPC created, they did not care about the urgency of electoral results as much as their Western counterparts do. Although they do care about the results of an invisible century-long election, they are just not in a rush.

So, how do all these tens of millions of officials and bureaucrats fill up their spare time? Their stated mission is to help China get richer and stronger, and I will talk more about this in Part II.

Merit #2: The CPC has its own idea of what politics look like, which some members of China’s elite may not agree with

The CPC runs a one-party system, with itself as that one party. It writes into the constitution of the People’s Republic of China that the leadership of the CPC is a “defining feature” of China’s system.

Obviously, not everyone in the non-party population agrees. From what I observe, a considerable minority of China’s educated elites disagree with this type of governing system. They would prefer a Western-style parliamentary system. They are considerable in the sense that they are, according to my best estimates, numbered in millions and perhaps tens of millions.

But even if there are 10 million of them, they are still decidedly a minority.

Consider the “Liberalist/Traditionalist” mental model I introduced last year, in which I divide China into roughly 10% (70m - 200m people) vs the rest of the 90% of the population. The so-called dissidents usually appear in that 10%, and perhaps only a tiny portion of that 10% because 1) Most of the 98 million CPC members are also in that 10%, 2) Of the non-party members in the “10%”, many genuinely support the CPC, and 3) for those who really hate the CPC and also have the means, very likely they have already emigrated. After all, the Chinese law does not ban people from leaving the country. It’s called “vote by feet”.

What about the remaining 90% of people, you may ask? Well, these will be the kind of people that, if you find them on a street and ask what kind of political system they would prefer, they would answer you with a blank face: “What is a political system?” These people do not have political agency until the most dire moment, and for the most part, they do not really care if it’s the CPC, or the KMT, or the Manchus, or whoever are in power, so long as they can bring food to the table and put shelter above their families. They are, for lack of a better phrase, “China’s MAGA”, except they don’t have votes and usually do not have a say in anything.

Ultimately, what’s the percentage of the total population living in China who genuinely and consciously do not support the CPC rule?

My totally unscientific estimate for that is less than 1%. That’s right, <1%. That’s around or fewer than 10 million people, and also tend to be some of the most vocal and most educated people. For this group of intellectual elites, no, the CPC is not China. For them, the “CPC vs. China” narrative makes sense.

This group is effectively China’s shadow opposition party. A lot of political control programs of the CPC are designed to contain, splinter, and co-opt this shadow opposition, while a main task of US policy on China is often to empower them to challenge CPC's rule. The controversial political movement 36 years ago was essentially a struggle between the CPC and this shadow opposition party over the future of China.

10 million people is a lot, but still less than 1% of the total population, and I am not sure if the Rubios and the Clintons know that the constituency they are banking on is actually so, so small.

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Part II. Where “CPC vs. China” falls flat

These are as much as I can say about the merits. Now comes my challenge, which I think is more important to take note of.

#1: Both the CPC and Chinese people want a prosperous and unified China

On issues that truly matter to the Chinese people, from prosperity to territorial integrity, there is really not a strong difference between what the CPC wants and what the Chinese people want. The biggest danger of indulging yourself in the “CPC vs. China” narrative is that at the most crucial moment, you make huge mistakes thinking these two actually want different things.

Take this ongoing trade war as an example. There is no shortage of Western commentators who somehow believe that by applying maximum pressure on China, and when the Chinese economy suffers, the Chinese people will rise up against the CPC. Jesse Waters of Fox:

What these tariffs are doing to China is collapsing their economy, increasing unemployment, and possibly toppling their regime. So, if they don’t want their regime to fall, they better make a deal with us.

But Jesse completely ignored the simple fact that most of the Chinese people can see with their own eyes that it’s the US side who are actively sabotaging their prospects.

And then there is the ban on China’s chip industry, citing its link to the PLA and CPC. But do Chinese people think that way? No. Most of the Chinese people only know it’s their rights to grow that have been denied, and their jobs and profits that are at stake.

As for the impending student visas ban for students “related to the CPC”. First of all, because party membership is so pervasive, and in effect ALL pupils in China were once members of the Young Pioneers, CPC’s version of the Boy Scouts, it’s not an exaggeration to say that every Chinese student is related to the CPC. And for the students whose visas are going to be revoked, they will not place the blame on the CPC, but solely on Uncle Sam.

And Taiwan? I often say to my friends that had it not been for CPC and the relatively stable political system it runs, there could have been war in the Taiwan Strait much sooner, initiated by a demagogue who would have come into power on a platform of strong nationalistic support.

Denying prosperity and territorial integrity not only does not make the CPC more alienated from the Chinese people, but can actually boost CPC’s power. After all, to make China richer and stronger has always been the CPC’s stated mandate, and what better justification for such a mandate than standing up to a bully who wants to make Chinese people poorer and weaker?

#2: Both the CPC and Chinese people are cut from the same cloth

When I hear Westerners talk about the CPC, I often have the impression that it’s some cartoonish alien overlords who suddenly come down from heaven and subjugate Chinese people to their rule.

If you think about it, who are those CPC members? Is CPC some kind of a caste or apartheid system where all CPC members just live amongst themselves and enjoy their lives at the expense of the non-CPC low-lives?

Not at all. Most of the 98 million CPC members are drawn from the people and also live amongst the people. Sure, that cohort includes government bureaucrats, generals, police officers, but it also includes teachers, doctors, bankers, farmers, factory workers, scientists, dancers, writers, influencers, and every imaginable profession. Since the very beginning of the CPC as a workers’ party and later a peasant guerrilla army, it has tried to draw its members from every corner of society. And when society evolves, it also makes sure to incorporate new elements. One significant example was Jiang Zemin’s theory of the “Three Represents”, codified in 2002 and essentially a rewriting of the party doctrine to incorporate new elements of society, such as private entrepreneurs, into the fold, and requires the CPC, at all times, to strive to:

• Represent the development trend of China's advanced productive forces;

• Represent the orientation of China's advanced culture;

• Represent the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people.

This “super-incorporatist” nature of the CPC ensures that there is a “你中有我，我中有你 You in me, me in you” type of relationship between the Party and the People.

No, this is not apartheid, nor is it some kind of inherited nobility. In fact, all of the CPC members were non-CPC members once in their lives, and were born and raised much the same way as the non-CPC people, and eat and drink the same cultural nutrition just like everyone else.

The implication is clear: whatever you like or don’t like about the CPC, you will not like or don’t like about Chinese people as well. Whatever you like or don’t like about the Chinese people, you will also find the same thing with the CPC.

Do you like that Chinese people are hard-working? Well, CPC members are hardworking too; they also tend to be the hardest-working people among all of the Chinese. How else do they claim leadership roles?

You think the CPC is bad at propaganda? Well, Chinese people aren’t good at self-promotion either.

You think CPC is too cunning? Well, Chinese people are very smart and cunning, too.

You like that Chinese people are generally peace-loving people who usually don’t like to resort to violence? Well, the CPC doesn’t like violence, either, at least comparatively speaking. You must have heard numerous stories of Soviets and Russians assassinating dissidents abroad. Even the Indian government was accused by Canada of killing dissidents. But despite stories of CPC keeping a watchful eye on the dissident community overseas, I struggle to remember any single case where human lives were at stake. For the Chinese sentimentality, violence is not just too cruel, but also too crude.

You don’t like CPC’s authoritarian and paternalistic system? Well, maybe that’s what Chinese people, at least most of them, want for themselves. It’s at least how many people treat their own family relationships. Have you heard of a “Tiger Mom”?

Again, I am not saying I like everything that the Chinese people do or the CPC does. I am just trying to state my observation of the facts, that these two are fundamentally intertwined to the degree that you can’t really tell one from another for all practical reasons.

It’s my belief that even if CPC is suddenly toppled today, if it’s still the same Chinese people we have for today, eventually another political organisation by a different name but exactly the same nature will prevail, and you will end up having something very similar to the CPC.

This is just like what happened in Egypt in the last decade. You don’t like the military dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak? Sure, let’s get rid of him. But then you are spooked even more by the Muslim Brotherhood, so in the end, you invite General Sisi into power. But what exactly is the difference between General Sisi and General Mubarak, whom you got rid of in the first place? None that I can tell.

(The topic of whether today’s Chinese people are fit with Western-style democracy is a controversial and emotionally charged one that I will review more deeply in the future.)

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So, what is the CPC anyway? It’s not an alien overlord ruling over innocent masses. Instead, it’s a manifestation of the level of social and political consciousness of the contemporary Chinese people, Chinese values and Chinese culture, and a common denominator for the most workable form of government accepted by the majority of the Chinese at this current moment.

In this sense, Dwarkesh Patel’s idea that he can “make a conspicuous effort to complement Chinese people, Chinese values, and Chinese culture” while countering the CPC was entirely nonsensical. It’s like criticizing a kid’s behaviors in front of his parents: “This kid is so nasty, so rude, so hateful! But no, I am definitely not criticizing you, the kid’s mother. I love you very much. You are such a nice person. And it’s definitely not your fault for not educating the kid well!”

Failure #3: The CCP does enjoy popular support

For a “super-incorporatist” political party that is also striving to bring to the Chinese people the things they want the most, it is not hard to draw the conclusion that the CPC, at least today, enjoys broad popular support domestically.

Indeed, the economy had not been performing well in the past few years. But that “not so well” is only felt so poignantly after one of the most spectacular, most consequential, and most peaceful urbanization stories in the history of humankind under the reign of the same CPC. For many people, especially the older generations, this remarkable track record is not just a passing thought. And despite many blunders throughout history, the CPC usually ended up making the overall right decisions.

This is not to suggest that this popular support will last forever. As new generations with no memory of wars, starvation, and chaos eventually emerge and take over the center stage, the perception of the CPC is also due to face new challenges. And the CPC is ever conscious and ever paranoid of this challenge.

Still, if we just look at today and the near future, it is reasonable to say that the CPC enjoys a very strong mandate.

Final Verdict

I understand this essay may be controversial, and I will not be able to persuade many people already wedded to their own ideas. I am sure the basic US policy toward China and the CPC will stay the same, and is likely to intensify along the current trajectory.

So this is my final advice for Secretary Rubio and the people he represents.

On the tactical side, even if the self-delusion of “CPC vs China” is to be continued, you should be mindful of two basic facts. First, this policy is essentially getting yourself into the domestic politics of China by explicitly supporting China’s “shadow opposition party”. There are numerous ways this kind of policy could backfire. Just imagine what will happen if China is actively supporting the Democrats right now.

Another basic fact, as I have described, is that you have to have a clear-headed assessment of how much power this opposition party actually has. At less than <1% of the total population (and perhaps far less than 1%), you will need to think about whether the rewards of this policy can justify the costs.

My final piece of advice is about grand strategy. Even if you keep holding onto this illusion of “CPC vs China”, and you can’t help but to detest the CPC, there is only one serious way you can counter it, and that is by being a better version of yourself.

America is the most attractive, and its beacon is the brightest when you are self-confident and lead by example. Absent that, you do not have the moral high ground to make even a dent on CPC’s rule, which, as I have just explained, is not only strong but is getting ever stronger as a result of where America is going right now.

Yes, your Robert Wu has officially become someone who has written an opinion for the Times. The essay is (now) titled Trump Has Botched His Tariff War With China.

It is a positively encouraging sign to see an institution like the NYT looking to diversify its voice and to tear down the “ideological monotony”. It shows that my work here at China Translated and , bridging the informational gap, is totally worth it.

But a more cynical and realistic interpretation is that it could just be because a shared hatred of Donald Trump is a unifying force. As one of the very few China-based opinion writers for the NYT, I was waiting for a storm of criticism coming at me. Instead, the reviews and comments I received from NYT readers were overwhelmingly positive. The vibe is really shifting since Trump stepped into the White House again.

The essay itself was very easy to finish, and was essentially an expansion and re-purposing of my Briefing #47. However, the editing process took me 5 days and a few dozen emails back and forth, showing the rigor of the NYT, as well as the pains we took to manage our subtle differences and find the common ground. I won’t go into details since it’s confidential, but I can say that there were many instances where each side would want to emphasize something or de-emphasize something, while the other side disagreed. At times, it almost feels like how two opposing nations try to cut, slice, rephrase, and haggle just to hash out a joint communique satisfactory to both sides.

Another amazing experience was to witness how my own work was recycled by Chinese state media for the domestic audience. My friends joked that I had succeeded at “出口转内销”-exporting to re-import.

The first such reaction was by Global Times, which wrote this piece with my permission. They were very positive about my article. At the end of the article, they also used a good photo of a screenshot of me speaking with ’s and ’s during one Got China episode.

The article by China Daily, though, was published without notifying me. They used a sensational title, “中国人不怕，中国人能吃苦！” “Chinese people are not afraid! Chinese people can eat bitterness!” Of all the points I made in my opinion piece, they only focused on one point I made about China’s relative resilience to suffer pain and chiku, or “eat bitterness”, compared with the Americans. But it gives the wrong impression that this is the only point I am making, as if the only strength of China is suffering.

Understandably, on the Chinese internet, there are also angry people reacting to this China Daily article. For instance, this one titled “Someone is slandering our intelligence again! He even went to the US to say Chinese people love to eat bitterness!” basically called me a very bad hypocrite. Don’t worry, I am not troubled by this. It is just comical to see yourself somehow held up as a villain.

What’s more comical is that, in my first draft, I didn’t even mention the whole concept about chiku. My thesis centered on China’s low dependence on trade with the US, years of preparation, new policy initiatives, and a unified public opinion against Trump, all of which were seen as China's main strengths. It was actually my NYT editor who first suggested that I mention something about it, to which I agreed.

Can you see the irony here?

Overall, I rate it as an amazing experience. It’s a unique glimpse into how public opinions might be shaped in our era. It’s also a live experience of seeing how your words, once they enter the public domain, will always be manipulated and repurposed by someone else. The NYT wants to “use” me to attack Trump. The Chinese state media would use me as a successful example of Chinese people making a stance in the Western media. Some random people would use a partial view of me to vent their own anger against the state media.

To be sure, it is my choice to be “used” by all of them in this discourse ecosystem, and I consider it a privilege to witness all of these dramas.

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A guest response to my NYT op-ed by Michael Hejtmanek

I am also posting a response to my NYT article by Michael Hejtmanek, VP of Consulting for Neudata. Neudata is one of our good business partners at BigOne Lab, but please note that this is Michael's personal opinion and not that of Neudata. He is not speaking on behalf of Neudata on this topic.

After his essay, I will also post a translation of a famous Chinese blogger about his views on why Robert Lighthizer and Michael Pettis are wrong, and what the US should really do, but probably would not be able to do, if the US really wanted to re-industrialize. Keyword: going after corporate profits.

Michael Hejtmanek:

Robert Wu’s editorial rightly captures many of the critical missteps in how the U.S. has approached its trade standoff with China. But it’s worth expanding the lens a bit further.

Yes, China exported $438 billion in goods to the U.S. last year — but that figure doesn’t reflect the full picture. China also exports over $1 trillion in components and raw materials to Asian neighbors, many of which serve as offshore assembly hubs before goods are routed into the U.S. market. That indirect flow is precisely why President Xi’s recent diplomatic tour of Asia was so significant — reinforcing those ties ensures that China’s trade engine continues running, even amid tightening U.S. tariffs.

Meanwhile, the Trump team has opened a second front — this time with Europe — escalating trade tensions with the only natural ally the U.S. might have had in shaping a unified approach to China. Instead of fostering alignment with Brussels, Washington is now risking a transatlantic fracture that plays directly into Xi Jinping’s hands. Alienated by tariffs and tech restrictions, European leaders are increasingly engaging with Beijing on trade, green tech, and AI cooperation. The result? A strategic vacuum that China is more than ready to fill.

Equally perplexing is the U.S. request that Japan, the largest holder of U.S. debt, inflate the value of the yen as a counterweight to China’s export strength, despite Japan having spent decades and trillions trying (unsuccessfully) to weaken its own currency in the face of structural deflation and demographic decline. Asking Japan to reverse-engineer 30 years of monetary policy to fit a U.S. campaign strategy isn’t just unrealistic — it suggests a serious misunderstanding of the economic realities at play.

What’s also missing from much of the U.S. rhetoric is a modern understanding of China itself. Vice President JD Vance recently referred to Chinese citizens as “peasants,” likely unaware that the term in Chinese ("nongmin") refers to farmers and often carries a sense of cultural pride rather than insult. But the bigger issue is what this reveals — many American political voices still misread China through outdated Cold War lenses, ignoring its rise as a complex, technologically advanced, and increasingly self-sufficient economy.

When I worked in Shenzhen at DJI, we took deep pride in being a homegrown Chinese technology company — not an IP thief, but an innovator building world-leading products. DJI’s founder, Frank Wang, is one of the most visionary entrepreneurs I’ve met — not a "peasant," not a proxy of the state, but a technologist who worked with the government to help shift the global perception of Chinese innovation.

The problem isn't that China is stealing — it's that China is now competing at the highest levels. And in many sectors, it's winning. What frustrates some in Washington may be less about unfair trade, and more about the fact that China has found success through a hybrid model of state involvement, capital controls, and long-term planning — a model that challenges conventional Western assumptions.

That said, for China to fully take on global economic leadership, especially as a credible alternative to the U.S.-led Bretton Woods system, it may need to take further steps: offering more transparency, allowing markets to liberalize in key sectors, and giving global businesses greater confidence that commercial decisions can be made independent of state priorities. Until then, China's ambition and momentum are real — but questions around trust and openness remain barriers to full global acceptance.

Robert is right — much of the leverage now sits with Beijing. While China still has internal reforms to pursue if it wants the renminbi to become a true global standard, the momentum is undeniably shifting. If there was ever a moment to rethink assumptions about U.S. economic exceptionalism, this may be it.

The question now isn’t whether America is winning or losing — it’s whether it’s even asking the right questions.

Michael currently lives in New York. He has extensive experience in software, manufacturing, investment, and data space throughout his career, and he has lived / worked in many countries, including the UK, Canada, Sweden, Mexico, and China. His LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Who should Trump really go after to re-industrialize America?

Finally, let me share one of my favorite Chinese bloggers, Mufeng, whom Trump should really look to for re-industrializing America.

The essay is titled:

为什么说川普的智囊开错了药方 Why do I say Trump’s advisors gave the wrong prescription

By Mu Feng

Reflecting on the problems brought about by hyper-globalization is something researchers on both sides of the G2 are doing. On the Chinese mainland side, there's more focus on boosting domestic demand. Researchers' thinking is currently quite unified, with a more profound and down-to-earth understanding compared to the US side, and it's also less extreme. In contrast, the reflection in the US is currently more chaotic, leading to policy confusion.

The author reiterates the premise that hyper-globalization has indeed brought many problems, mainly manifested in two inequalities: inequality between countries and inequality within a country. Therefore, the re-globalization phase actually aims to solve or at least alleviate these two inequalities. [redacted]

The author believes that the main advisors for Trump's second-term policies, represented by Robert Lighthizer and Michael Pettis, have prescribed the wrong remedy for the US's problems.

The long-standing real problem in the US is the issue of internal distribution, which mainly manifests in two aspects:

First, during hyper-globalization, US multinational corporations have massively outsourced their manufacturing segments, while retaining branding and core technology development capabilities (intellectual property) in the US. The entire production process takes place overseas at low costs. This has led to a decreasing number of jobs that the US domestic production sector can offer.

Second, the high degree of liberalization in US healthcare (including commercial health insurance), education, and law, while seemingly generating very high incomes for these service industries, comes at the cost of high expenses for the entire population. This so-called high-end service sector cannot actually absorb a large number of employees, but it has a significant impact on the cost of living for the general public.

Regarding the above problems, the normal solutions should be to tax multinational corporations registered in the US, forcing them to move their overseas production bases back to the US, and to reduce the costs of healthcare and education in the US as much as possible.

However, the US political system and the current political reality make it difficult to implement the aforementioned solutions that target the vested interests in the US. The two parties can only reach consensus when scapegoating foreigners. Since they cannot tax domestic large enterprises or compress the interests of domestic insurance and education sectors, they can only look for alternative solutions.

Trump's advisors believe that the main reason for the US's current problems is not the above, but rather that countries with trade surpluses with the US deliberately depress their exchange rates, thereby gaining a production cost advantage.

Based on the author's long-term reading and thinking on globalization issues, Trump's advisors seem to be excessively focused on the exchange rate issue while neglecting other reasons that have led to the current state of globalization.

Since 2018, the author has consistently argued that, compared to US manufacturing, German and Japanese manufacturing did not lose their identities as much during globalization. Like the US, Germany, and Japan also experienced large-scale industrial outsourcing during globalization, with mainland China becoming their outsourced production base. However, the domestic manufacturing industries in Germany and Japan did not decline like that in the US. In the words of Japanese scholar Itami Takayuki, Japanese companies' globalization is a "pizza-style" globalization, meaning the core part has always been in Japan, and the domestic market has long maintained a certain production capacity. Germany has done something similar. Of course, Japan and Germany are now also experiencing the impact of technological revolutions, which is another issue.

So, is it just an exchange rate problem? Not really. The US underwent a round of proactive and large-scale de-industrialization during globalization, which was its own choice.

Of course, they now regret it, feel it was wrong, and need to restore domestic manufacturing capabilities. But they can't clearly articulate what to restore. Trump's advisors didn't intend to restore low-end and mid-range manufacturing and know it's fundamentally impossible, a point Stephen Miran mentioned in his report. However, for the sake of votes, they can't say this. Instead, they can only promote the idea of even producing shirts domestically. Many Americans themselves find this amusing, and there are many jokes online.

What the US truly hopes to restore is high-value-added, high-end manufacturing with strategic significance, such as advanced semiconductor production, as well as individual industries with traditional advantages, such as automobile manufacturing.

Since politicians dare not tax US multinational corporations to force them to relocate their industries back to the US, yet they want to promote the return of manufacturing, the alternative solution proposed is to impose tariffs. To impose tariffs, they have to go through a convoluted argument that all problems are caused by the trade deficit, and the reason for the problem is that surplus countries are depressing their exchange rates. At this point, they are already "reasoning backward from the result."

Not daring to directly address the domestic problems in the US makes the author feel that the current group of US advisors is very weak, especially the scholars among them who do not hold positions in the Trump administration and have no vested interests. In this situation, they are still disregarding facts and providing obviously wrong and counterproductive solutions, which is truly shameful.

Mainland China often has different voices as well, but the author believes that currently, both within and outside the government, regarding some fundamental issues, the views among researchers tend to be relatively consistent. For example, the emphasis on domestic demand is a basic consensus among both official and market-side researchers, creating a sense of concerted effort. Of course, any reform requires time and opportunity to advance, but there is no confusion in the direction of thought. The situation in the US, where researchers who can influence decision-making deliberately provide absurd ideas, does not exist here.

The author even believes that there is a possibility that Trump's current key advisors may have been frustrated for a long time and hope to make breaking an old world, regardless of whether a new world can be built, their life goal.

Compared to directly taxing US domestic multinational corporations, what are the main problems with imposing tariffs?

First, both types of taxation can actually be used to force the so-called "manufacturing return" because they both significantly harm multinational corporations. Relatively speaking, directly taxing US domestic multinational corporations has lower friction costs. Trump's advisors seem to still be living in the era of the US-Japan trade war, when US production and Japanese production were completely competitive. US multinational corporations had not yet massively outsourced, so the trade war at that time was essentially US companies fighting Japanese companies. But can that be the same today? In today's globalized industrial chain, US domestic production is actually highly dependent on the production bases in mainland China and other surplus countries. Mainland China can claim that much of its production can be completed without importing US products at all, but it is difficult for US production to achieve this. Therefore, imposing tariffs leads to very high friction costs and will directly affect the normal operation of US domestic production. Since the goal is to force large enterprises to relocate their manufacturing departments, why go through tariffs? Isn't direct taxation better? After all, the decision of where to locate production lines is made by the headquarters of multinational corporations, not by their outsourcing companies.

Second, if the US goal is to bring back mid-range and high-end manufacturing, then targeted taxation of some enterprises is sufficient. There is no need to impose tariffs on all categories of products. The US has already abandoned low-end and mid-range products, and the low prices of these products are beneficial for reducing US inflation on daily necessities, which is obviously good for stabilizing US society. A full-scale tariff war will inevitably push up inflation, which in turn gives the Federal Reserve ample reason not to cut interest rates, further exacerbating the pressure on the US debt problem.

Then, besides tariffs, is preventing surplus countries from buying US assets really beneficial to the US? Don't rush, try the tariffs first, and then you can continue to try other things. Anyway, empty talk costs nothing, and Trump will take the blame.

Politicians choose advisors, and advisors also choose politicians. Cao Cao曹操 could use Guo Jia郭嘉, Liu Bei刘备 could use Zhuge Liang诸葛亮, and Sun Quan孙权 could use Zhou Yu周瑜, while Yuan Shao袁绍 could only use Feng Ji逢纪, and Dong Zhuo董卓 could only use Li Ru李儒. [Robert: All are references to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms]

Conversely, how could Guo Jia, Zhuge Liang, and Zhou Yu have stayed with Yuan Shao and Dong Zhuo for even a day?

Of course, even if a US scholar has lived in Beijing for a long time, he probably wouldn't understand these allusions. [Robert: This is non-subtle sarcasm at Michael Pettis. Do you think Pettis understands these cultural references?]

Today, I am going to focus on the more practical stuff. How this “low trust to strangers” culture form the particular kind of business landscape of China?

There are many problems because of “trust deficit”, as all business essentially is built on trust. But a “low-trust” background also provides unique opportunities for those who know the game, which will be the focus of the second half of this article.

Problem #1: Inefficiencies

One obvious negative consequence of low trust is that it creates massive inefficiencies in businesses. Because of these inefficiencies, business activities that should have taken place, fail to occur. The many meetings and Baijiu binge sessions that it takes to build trust, as I wrote about in Part 1, is just one of many aspects that slow things down. But the problem goes deeper and wider and manifests itself in many distinct features of our business life. I will name just a few examples here, but I am sure I am missing hundreds more.

Vertically integrated giants

One enduring aspect of China internet space is that top players all tend to become vertically integrated players, which is really just a fancier way to say: everyone wants do everything themselves. When you think of Google, you think of search. When you think of Meta, you think of Facebook and Instagram.

But when you think of Tencent, you think of WeChat, and WeChat Pay, and WeChat Games, and Tencent Cloud, and Tencent Meeting (China’s Zoom), and Corporate WeChat (a CRM software).

When you think of ByteDance, you think of Douyin/TikTok, and Douyin E-commerce, and Douyin local coupons, and news-reading app Toutiao, and even business collaboration software Feishu/Lark.

When you think of JD, you think of e-commerce. But recently, they just announced they were breaking into food delivery, traditional turf of Meituan. While Meituan, for its own part, had a long history of breaking into other people’s backyards, such as hotel bookings.

And almost every Internet company of some size has its own cloud computing unit and its own payment service. I am not exaggerating here. You know Alipay and WeChat Pay, but you probably don’t know that Pinduoduo, JD, Meituan, Didi, Trip.com, Xiaomi, and many others all have payment subsidiaries and offer all sorts of incentives to entice their users to use their own payment services.

This landscape is a by-product of a do-everything-on-my-own mindset, which is obviously not the most efficient, but because of our “low-trust” nature, it’s the most optimal in the Chinese context. After all, why should I trust other people to manage my payments, or cloud computing? What if my data is stolen to hurt me? How can I manage them if their service delivery is suboptimal?

Lack of merger & acquisition (M&A) activities

If you watch China’s business and investment landscape long enough, you will notice that compared with the US market, there are far fewer M&A activities in China. I don’t have precise data, but I imagine it’s something like a whopping 1:1000 ratio between the two countries, despite almost parity in terms of GDP.

The trust deficit is still to blame here. M&A is an inherently sensitive moment in which at least one party is going to open up its books for the acquirer to have a complete look. Can the acquirer be trusted to open up the books? Can the books be trusted? If there is a degree of fishiness in the books, can you trust that the remainder is still okay? Even if the books are good, how can the acquirer stop the seller from engaging in competing businesses after exit, which would fundamentally impair the value of the acquisition target?

You can see that when trust is insufficient, M&A activities can quickly get stalled. It’s a high-stake game where instant trust among strangers matters a great deal. But because of lack of such trust, instead of a constant stream of M&A news every day, we only have sporadic cases here and there, most are too small to be meaningfully risky ( so even if all acquisition money is lost, it wouldn’t be too painful.) In other cases, it’s done by parties who have already known each other for a long time.

Corporate succession dilemma

Another reason that M&As are hard to find is that willing sellers are also hard to find.

Many corporate owners are first-generation entrepreneurs, some of whom are looking to retire. In a high-trust environment, it’s natural for them to hire professionals to run their business and/or to sell to buyout funds or bigger peers.

But in our culture, it’s always a first instinct to pass it down to their own children. But because your parent is a successful entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily mean you can be successful as well, and it’s always inefficient when your choices for a successor are restricted only to the limited gene pool of yourself.

Eventually, the successful ones will find the right way to trust outside professionals in order to continue their family legacy. One such example is home appliance and manufacturing giant Midea Group. Today, it’s one of the very few businesses in China where the founding family not only doesn’t run the company anymore, but doesn’t even join the board either. But I imagine the majority of companies who can’t build such a level of trust will eventually fade away as first-generation founders inevitably leave the scene.

Bias toward hardware instead of software

Chinese people love hard things. We don’t like it to be soft. Hardware is hard. It’s more real. Software? I can’t see it. I can’t smell it. It could be anything you describe to me, or it could be just a pile of garbage. How can I trust it’s real?

This is the fundamental reason why the SaaS industry in China is still tiny compared with its Western peers. In the B2B setting, it’s much easier to sell a piece of hardware, with flashy screens and huge servers, than selling a piece of formless software. For instance, a few years ago, when DeepMind shocked the world with AlphaGo, there was a proliferation of AI companies selling tumor detection software to Chinese hospitals. Today, most of them have faded away, while the surviving ones can only attach themselves as subcontractor of large imaging equipment makers.

Problem #2: “Quick money” culture

Another major problem of a low-trust society is that it helps create a “quick money” culture.

Since strangers are not to be trusted, even if they are doing good things today, who is to trust them to keep doing it for a long time?

Businesses that require years of patient development and investment struggle to thrive. Imagine a biotech startup needing a decade for drug development; investors, wary of the unpredictable future, might favor a quick e-commerce venture instead. This creates a market where rapid returns are prized over sustainable, long-term growth, and is also behind the government’s lament for “patient capital”.

This short-term focus permeates the stock market, leading to dramatic boom-and-bust cycles. Investors chase fleeting trends, creating quick bubbles and crashes.

Just think of stocks like Laopu Gold and POP Mart, two Chinese ten-baggers in the last year (which we at Baiguan also reminded our subscribers of sufficiently early). These two are high-quality growth names. But at ~100x price-to-earnings ratio, do investors piling into them think about what they will become in 10 years, or even just in 5 years? No, they don’t. And they don’t care. 10 years or even 5 years are too long to “trust”. If it’s good, just enjoy the moment today.

I know this kind of short-term behavior is common too in parts of Western capital markets. But in China, it’s the norm. The last decade has actually gotten better, when our market has become more institutionalized. Before that, short-term speculation was actually all there was.

Within such a culture, you can imagine how hard it must be to create a business that requires a long horizon, how many temptations there are for you to make quick money, and how much courage it takes to not to win quick bucks along the way.

Problem #3: Unstable regulatory environment

In Part 1, I mentioned a specific type of “low trust”, which is between the government and the people, and I have also mentioned one particular kind of inefficiency, which is this intentional vagueness of laws.

This is bad for businesses because they always look for certainty and predictability.

Sometimes, such vagueness will also hit a tipping point, when long-simmering structural imbalances erupt into a paradigm shift in policy, or, as I wrote about before, a pendulum swing.

It’s like a bomb. Most of the time, it’s just tic-tac-toe, tic-tac-toe, and people manage to live comfortably with it until the moment it BANGs! The crackdown on the tutoring industry in 2021 was one of such explosions that smashed many people’s goodwill toward China.

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Okay, so much for the problems. For the optimist in me, it’s always the opportunities that interest me the most. Usually, the best opportunities come hand in hand with deep problems. Only by solving the deepest problem can the reward be the largest. For each of the 3 problems above, I see 3 huge opportunities.

Opportunity #1: Building high-trust bonds in a sea of low-trust

One major corollary of a “low-trust” society is that once trust is obtained, this trust can be extremely strong, and even stronger than the bonds formed in high-trust societies.

This mechanism is similar to what I described in the last post, about Chinese people’s “over-trust” of those we are close to, as much as the under-trust of strangers.

Since trust is so scarce, it becomes a kind of coveted resource. Your best strategy is to try to form high-trust bonds in a sea of low-trust. It will be your secret weapon and can help you build incredible moat. The payoff can be huge.

China itself offers ample case studies for this strategy. Within China, there are many sub-cultures, notably in Chaozhou/Teowchow (where Li Ka Shing was born) and Wenzhou, which are famous for building incredible business empires. Their secret ingredient is forming highly robust high-trust networks among the clansmen wherever they go. I personally know quite a few people from these regions, and often times they can borrow money from each other with just a few words, and their words become gold. You can easily imagine what an incredible competitive advantage this can be over most other Chinese, who mostly live in socially atomized forms.

By now, you should rethink what you previously understood about the much-loaded Chinese phrase “Guanxi”. Many people confuse Guanxi with networking, or gift-making, or just happily drinking Moutai with each other.

The real meaning of Guanxi can’t be understood without putting it in the context of our “low-trust” society. Guanxi is just another name for this high-trust bond in the sea of low trust. Because trust is a scarce resource, it takes time and effort to win it. Common bonding, like coming from the same school, making gifts, or drinking baijiu, are only means to this end. It’s all about making guarded people accept you as one of their own.

If you are not into this “high trust, low trust” stuff, it’s actually totally fine. Sometimes, the most radical and somewhat counter-intuitive strategies can also win you Guanxi. For instance, being 100% transparent about yourselves and being blunt at the right moment can give you special power since few other people do it this way. If you manage to build a personal brand around these qualities, you will also become a master at quickly obtaining other people’s trust.

Beyond building a strong social network, a low-trust society also offers ample room for technologists. One of the best examples is Jack Ma’s Alipay.

Alipay was China’s first major online payment company. But when the Alibaba people created Alipay, their plan was not to create a payment service per se. Instead, they wanted to solve a problem arising from the fledgling Taobao platform that they had just built.

Now, let’s take a step back and consider this question: If China is such a low-trust society, how come China’s e-commerce market has become the world’s largest? It doesn’t make sense if you think about it. Since if we don’t trust strangers, how did we even trust strangers we never even met in person?

This was the same problem people at Taobao faced, and Alipay was their invention to solve this problem.

Essentially, the main function of Alipay in its early days was an escrow service. The buyer paid money to Alipay/Taobao, which held it for a few days until the goods were delivered and the buyer confirmed to be satisfied, when the escrow money was released. With this simple technology, the Alipay/Taobao teams unlocked the mammoth potential of China’s e-commerce market, and also became one of the most profitable businesses along the way.

CCTV camera is another example, which is essential physical infrastructure that has helped China to obtain globally low crime rates, while also adding to our improving societal trust levels. Proliferation of CCTV cameras are enabled by a whole cluster of successful companies, the largest of which is Hikvision, whose stock price surged 15x in the 10 years after China started to make CCTV cameras ubiquitous.

Opportunity #2: Building highly powerful brands

What’s the biggest opportunity in which most people only have the stomach for quick bucks? Well, refuse the temptation. Focus on building value. Focus on building powerful brands.

Do it relentlessly and unswervingly. The prize can be huge in the end. Because when most people are in quick-money mode, the very few people who think in the long-term can actually have the chance to build something truly incredible.

Although China’s market economy has been around for less than 40 years, we already have enough boom and bust cycles to prove this point.

Think of Evergrande vs. Huawei / BYD / Moutai.

In the go-go years of China’s real estate market, it was all about making quick money. The quicker, the better. Evergrande was only the largest one of the thousands of real estate developers playing this get-rich-fast game. But look where they are now? Whatever they have earned in the past, they gave it back in the end.

Huawei and BYD were much alike, run by founders who have big dreams and seriously care about research and development instead of short-term profits. Huawei, for example, has never been listed and probably will never be. This might not seem obvious in the beginning, when the more glamorous peers took the spotlight. But given time, the compounding effect will be significant, and now they have become two of the largest companies in China, whose founders sat straight across Xi Jinping in the private business symposium recently.

Moutai is another example. In a low-trust society, you would assume people don’t trust brands. To the contrary, it’s precisely because of lack of trust in general, when trust is truly established, the branding power can be incredible. Today, Moutai is China’s Hermes, becoming one of the most profitable companies by selling essentially fermented water. At market capitalization of ~$300b, it’s the largest liquor company in the world, 6 times that of Diageo, all for selling essentially just one product.

Opportunity #3: Taking advantage of the seemingly unpredictable policy changes

I understand that it can be frustrating that there always seems to be policy uncertainty in China. However, the right attitude to deal with it is to accept that things like the 2021 education crackdown do happen occasionally. The key here is to understand that there will always be policy pendulum swings, which I wrote about last October, and a keen observer will try to understand what’s the axis that this pendulum swings around, where the wind blows, and when the moment is for it to swing back. It’s actually not that hard to do. And once you know how to do it, there are many opportunities for policy arbitrage.

One example is the policy pivot around Covid in 2022. After April, when Shanghai was in lockdown and the central leadership seemed keen on maintaining Zero-Covid policy, many people believed there would be no end of it in sight. When asked about this at the time, my response was that, they would change, but it would take a mass social unrest to compel them to change. Look what happened in the end.

Similarly, it was also a wave of shocking discriminate killings by desperate people that partially compelled the government to embark upon a huge policy pivot towards boosting domestic demand and consumption.

The whole education crackdown was another episode. At the time, foreign investors interpreted the unprecedented move as part of some sort of grand plan to crack down on private businesses. But that crackdown never came, and the government eventually walked back from it. In truth, it was only a targeted move seeking to correct the social problems around after-school tutoring, although the way it was carried out was frankly quite a mess.

In each of these events, massive price dislocations were caused in the capital market. But for the people understand the underlying nature, it is also easy to turn into those events into highly profitable trades. For instance, TAL and EDU, two largest tutoring players’ stocks have returned 5 fold since their nadir.

For Part 3, I will look at how “low-trust” shapes the kind of political system China has right now. Stay tuned!

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So Ms. A is my friend, a banker who recently advised a Western firm in acquiring a Chinese target company. Naturally, during the due diligence process, the bankers and lawyers uncover a few problems about the target company. Ms. A was going through these problems with the Western firm. One of the issues concerned unpaid social security expenses.

Chinese companies have a very high social security obligation. Although the apparent personal income taxes don’t look high, combined with social security expenses, the “real” tax level can be higher than the levels of European developed economies. If fully paid, only half of the employee compensation can actually go to the employees, with the other half going into taxes and public social security funds.

The state-owned enterprises and listed companies are mostly compliant in this area, but most of the unlisted medium-, small- and mini-sized enterprises are not. The government knows about it but usually doesn’t enforce the rules, fearing that full compliance will crush those small enterprises. So naturally, when one of these firms goes on sale, social security non-compliance issues almost always appear in the list of concerns.

Representatives of the Western firm asked Ms. A what this was. Ms. A was at a loss how to respond. To be sure, this is illegal. But it’s also not so serious because everyone does it, and the government knows everyone does it. She didn’t want to derail the transaction, yet she also had professional ethics to uphold, so she couldn’t lie either. Ohh…ahh…you know…you know…you know… She was very tortured in her explanation. The Western firm people were very confused and asked a bombshell question:

“So, is this slave labor?”

What the?! Ms. A was totally shocked and spent the next whole hour scrambling to explain that, no, this is absolutely not slave labor. Whatsoever. Not at all. It’s not a good thing, but it’s very common. It’s no big deal and easily remediable.

I believe that Western company eventually let go of the issue, but I speculate they still didn’t fully get it.

In another recent conversation, a European friend asked me why there is so much “vagueness” in Chinese laws, driving a lot of Western firms uneasy, yet it seems most Chinese businesspeople are generally comfortable with this vagueness.

To really comprehend this, we need to recognize that there is something much deeper going on here, and it concerns a key feature of contemporary Chinese society.

It’s about China's “low-trust society.”

For this essay, I will first explain what I mean by this. I will explore why it’s the case and will give a few examples of how this applies to daily lives, including the “vagueness” above. For Part 2, I will discuss how this applies to business and investment decision-making in China. For Part 3, I will touch on how this societal feature determines the kind of political system and policy frameworks of modern China.

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What is a “low-trust” society?

To be sure, “low trust” does not mean there is no trust in our society. No society can exist or survive without trust. Without trust, transactions can’t take place. Without trust, governments can’t govern. Without trust, people cannot live with each other.

“Low trust” means we have a generally lower level of trust among people than in some of these “high-trust” societies, like the West.

The defining difference lies in whether we trust strangers. Here, by “strangers,” I don’t just mean any random Joe on the street. The “strangers” could be one of your colleagues, one of our business counterparts, or even your neighbors. They could be any person who you don’t really know that well, anyone outside your immediate family, and anyone whom you don’t deem as your real friend.

In a low-trust society, people tend not to trust strangers.

Another story I saw somewhere: A girl went back to her village to spend the Spring Festival holiday with her grandma. One day, their neighbor’s hen laid some eggs in their backyard. The girl wanted to return the eggs to their neighbor. But her grandma stopped her. Just eat the eggs, Grandma admonished, what if our neighbor thought it was us who stole them?

To your Western ears, you might want to find this grandma to be too cynical. For me, although I won’t agree with her, I totally get why she responded in such a way. It's very likely that, many years ago, when this grandma was also an innocent girl, she did something out of goodwill, only to be met by hard lessons of trusting “strangers” too much. “人心叵测 ​People’s hearts are hard to fathom.”

When I do business with both Western and Chinese counterparts, I see a clear difference in how each of them perceive “trust.”

In the West, whenever you meet a new business partner, your assumption is that this person is to be trusted. You start with the assumption of a full “trust score”. If there is anything that undermines this trust, you subtract from that score. The partner keeps doing weird stuff? You subtract that score even more, until the moment when the partner lies straight to your face. Oh shoot, these guys are not trustworthy at all! You immediately cross them out and will never bother working with them.

In short, in the West, you are trustworthy until proven otherwise.

In China, the process works the other way around. Here, you are not trustworthy until proven otherwise. The starting assumption is that you should not be trusted. Your starting “trust score” is 0. And you build from there. Maybe something happens that shows that, hmm, you are a bit more trustworthy than assumed, so they add the scores. And after several tests and trials, your “trust score” reaches a point when your business partner finally admits that, hey, you are a trustworthy person after all!

In China’s “low-trust society,” building trust as a stranger needs effort.

China’s model makes me think of one recent interview on hiring and management philosophy by Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, when he talked about “every potential hire was guilty until proven innocent.” (video below, at 28:40 mark)

What Chesky means is that when most people interview potential hires, they work from the assumption that the candidate is good, and so they interview to find potential weaknesses. Chesky thinks this approach is dead wrong. Instead, you should assume the candidate is not good, and look for evidence to suggest the candidate may not be bad after all.

Chesky’s line of thinking is actually the same as how it works in China. The fact that Chesky brought this up as if it was some kind of counter-intuitive idea for his Western audience is quite telling for understanding the West-China differences here.

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Why does China have a low-trust society?

I always like to ask about the “why”, but I know most people don’t care, so I will skim through this part quickly.

The first reason is obviously poverty or at least memories of poverty. When material resources are scarce, people tend to be impatient to get rich. Inevitably, some people will cut corners. Some will cheat. You don’t need everyone to be a cheater to break down trust. If only 1 out of 100 is a cheater and becomes successful because of cheating, cynicism will spread like wildfire, and very soon, you will not be able to trust people that much.

This is why being “low-trust” is not a hallmark of China alone but also applies to many developing countries. I imagine there exist a roughly positive correlation between material wealth and societal trust levels. Furthermore, as Chinese people become richer, I feel that younger generations operate in a higher trust mode than the previous generations.

Another reason may be that China has a “godless” society. In most of our minds, there is no place for God. We don’t live under the constant gaze of God or anything permanent. Since we don’t have a common faith in the permanent, self-interest is the only common denominator in conducting daily transactions. Everyone is purely for their own and/or the interests of their immediate nuclear families. It’s like the “dark forest” in Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem. It would be naive to assume strangers are to be trusted in the dark forest.

What are other examples of “low trust”?

The “low-trust” nature permeates the society. The “neighbor’s eggs” story is just one of the numerous cases Chinese people encounter on a daily basis.

It’s also prevalent in business dealings, where the stakes are higher than daily lives.

Business-making in China is often like courtship. It’s rare for a deal to be made between two companies in their first meetings. There will be many follow-up meetings to gauge each other's actual intent and creditworthiness.

This is also why liquor occupies such an important role in China’s business culture. People certainly don’t drink baijiu for banquets just because it has attractive flavors or because it is fun. The drinking culture in China is not for fun. Instead, it is a lubricant, creating an occasion for your potential future business partners to let down their guard, and show their true colors.

You are being watched while you drink. It’s part of the job.

In a society where most people don’t have faith in the permanent and don't trust each other, you would imagine people will look more to the government authorities to provide fair administration of justice.

But Chinese people are also too smart to realize that there is nothing godly about those “government authorities” either. Walking and sitting in the corridors of power are, after all, only human beings. Because they are also human beings, they are bound to make mistakes, be biased, and have their self-interests. In the eyes of ordinary folks, every official is presumed to be corrupt unless proven innocent. It’s like what I wrote when commenting on the movie Ne Zha 2: deep down, Chinese people are too cynical towards the government people to trust them blindly.

A vivid example was the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. In the days running up to the lockdown, the local Shanghai government was still trying to pacify residents that everything was under control and that there would be no lockdown. But people knew how it would play out, so they scrambled for daily necessities across the city despite government warnings against hoarding.

But on the other hand, the government doesn’t trust its people either, and not that these people deserve trust in the first place. Again, Chinese people are “too smart,” and they can always find ways to game the system. To manage these restless people, it’s not enough just to make some ordinary laws, because the Chinese people will devise all kinds of ways to find loopholes and work around these laws.

Instead, the government has to make extremely harsh laws. In the Criminal Code of PRC, as many as 422 types of felonies are listed. Many crimes can lead to serious consequences. For instance, a government official taking a bribe of over 3 million yuan (~$450K) can already be punishable by death. Spreading 500 pornographic videos can potentially give you up to 10 years in jail.

And it’s not just about being harsh but also sufficiently vague. Catch-all offenses and vague spaces for arbitrary rulings are everywhere. An infamous catch-all offense is the “寻衅滋事罪 crime for creating troubles,” a felony that could theoretically cover something as mundane as quarreling in public but is punishable by a maximum of 10 years of jail time, too. There was a proposal to add a new crime about “hurting national feelings”, which was fortunately dropped amid intense criticisms.

It seems heavy efforts are made to ensure any type of offense, large or small, will have a legal basis for punishment waiting for you. But it’s certainly not possible for the government to enforce all these laws. And so comes a common saying for the three prominent features of China’s legal system:

严格立法 Legislate strictly and harshly

普遍违法 Non-compliant commonly

选择性执法 Enforce the laws only selectively

The story about social security non-compliance at the beginning of this article is but one example of these features. The government makes very strict rules about social security contributions because, without doing so, many businesses may simply ignore their obligations. But because the rules are too strict, it’s practically impossible for most businesses to fully comply without going bankrupt, so virtually everyone is non-compliant. The government knows about all of this but would rather keep the status quo most of the time and would only enforce the law very selectively. Businesses know that government knows about this, and knows the hammer may fall at any time, but can’t do anything about it other than trying to stay in the good graces of the authorities, praying and just getting comfortable about it.

Everything thus hangs in a delicate balance. Unfortunately, without a fundamental upgrade of societal trust level, you will not see an end to this dynamic anytime soon.

For Part 2, I will discuss the challenges and unique opportunities this “low-trust” society brings to doing business and making investments in China. For Part 3, I will discuss why this can fundamentally explain the particular kind of political system that China has today. Stay tuned!

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Mar 31 update

Part 2 is here:

I also wrote an intermission post about some important caveats of my theory:

Just like today’s Ukraine.

However, I believe it’s also true that precisely because a weak power is weak, diplomacy may be the only weapon it can employ, and sometimes diplomacy can be a matter of life and death.

I can’t help but to think of one such moment when China was also a weak power, barely surviving at the hands of big powers. It’s, I believe, the most dangerous moment China faced in the last 500 years. It’s not the Opium War. It’s not 1900 when 8 great powers occupied Peking. It’s not 1937 when Shanghai fell and the Rape of Nanking happened. It’s not 1950 when Chinese and American forces fought each other in Korea. And it’s not 1969, when a total war almost broke out between China and the Soviet Union.

It was the moment when China almost sided with Nazi Germany.

The year was 1940. It was a moment that was so dangerous for China, but few people remember it precisely because we don’t remember what might have happened, but averted in the end. 1940 involved a weak power making a binary choice, and that choice turned out to be right in the end.

In 1940, China had been engaged in a gruesome war with Japan for more than 2 years. It had lost all of the coastal regions, and more than half of China Proper fell to Japanese invaders. (Drawing the analogy from the Ukraine War, China already lost the equivalent of Kyiv and all of the coastal regions a long time ago and barely hung on to the western city of Lviv.)

Britain and the US had not provided meaningful support to China, despite the fact Chiang committed the main body of his most elite forces, and immediately lost them, to fight the Battle of Shanghai, putting out a PR event for the Western media at the time, just like what Zelenskyy was doing every day on his Twitter account. Britain even threatened China to negotiate a settlement with Japan, in the same way Trump is threatening Zelenskyy right now.

On the other hand. Germany was strong. By that time, it had already eaten up Poland, and Paris had just fallen. Britain was fighting a lone war with Germany and may surrender at any moment. Germany became indisputably the greatest power in Europe.

Within such context, many key members of KMT’s top leadership, including Sun Ke, the son of founding father Sun Yat-sen, advocated that China should side with the Nazis, responding to an offer that the Nazis did make. H.H.Kung, the finance minister who married Madame Chiang’s sister, had just met Hitler a few years ago in 1937 and also supported this idea. Clearly, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had to make a choice here.

To be frank, this was an extremely tempting proposal.

We need to appreciate the peculiar time that was 1940 here. Despite warm feelings, Germany had not militarily allied with Japan until the Tripartite Pact in September of that year. But even that pact lacked substances at the time. After all, Germany had not yet invaded the Soviet Union, while Japan had yet to attack Pearl Harbour. The final configuration of WWII (the Allies vs, the Axis) was far from certain. So, siding with Germany didn’t necessarily mean China would side with Japan and wouldn’t necessarily antagonize Americans and Russians, at least not in 1940.

Not to mention, KMT had historically warm relations with Germany. Its best armies were German-trained and German-equipped. Chiang, also a fascist, openly admired Hitler and exchanged warm letters with him for years.

And not to mention, had Chiang chosen to join some kind of alliance with Germany and reached a truce with Japan mediated by Germany, he would not only be “protected” by Germany but would successfully neutralize the Wang Jingwei regime, China’s version of “Vichy”, a puppet Chinese government propped up by the Japanese, rivalling Chiang’s legitimacy.

And not to mention, had that truce been reached, there would be no more fighting and bloodshed, and hardship!

Putting you in the same seat as Chiang in 1940, unable to see what the future holds for you, it was actually difficult NOT to ally with Germany.

It’s a Faustian bargain, but it made all the sense.

In the end, Chiang made the right choice despite strong internal dissent. According to his diary, his ultimate line of reasoning was that if China sided with Britain, and Britain prevailed in the end, China would gain more than it would gain if China sided with Germany and Germany won.

This is a precarious judgement and essentially a comparison for the less worse choice. You could well imagine the number of sleepless nights Chiang might have over this. But he made the right choice, nonetheless.

The stakes were so high. The “what-if”s can be so tough to ponder. Had he tried to ally with Germany, China’s “century of humiliation” would last at least TWO centuries. At first, Japan would consolidate its territorial gains along China’s coast. Later, China would be dragged into a war with the Soviets and the US at the same time. The Germans and the Japanese were not likely to win that war, though, since China would have been too weak to change the ultimate trajectory of WW2, so China would eventually be partitioned into “North China” and “South China”, just like the two Koreas of today.

I often shudder at this thought. And I am so glad I was not born into that parallel universe.

I also have to say that, although Chiang later lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan, which created a big problem for today, his choice in 1940 saved China from certain doom.

What’s the key takeaway?

History can be precarious, mercurial, and fundamentally unpredictable. The only thing that can be done, especially for a small country, is to try to listen to the inner calls and do the right thing.

The problem, as always, is:

What is the right thing?

Kowtowing to two powerful bullies, which will almost certainly end the war but will also subjugate yourself to 100 years of slavery, or hanging on to an impossible war, backed by your weak, un-unified neighbors?

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What should a small country do to survive 21st Century? Read my essay on this:

China Translated

3 principles for a small country to survive great-power competition (Part 1)

[This is a free post. Ideally, I would want to limit the comment section to only my subscribers (both free and paid subscribers), but Substack doesn’t allow this option. So the comment section for this post is free for all. There is only one rule to observe here: be civil…

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2 years ago · 42 likes · 19 comments · Robert Wu

China Translated

3 principles for a small country to survive great-power competition (Part 2)

[This is a free post. Ideally, I would want to limit the comment section to only my subscribers (both free and paid subscribers), but Substack doesn’t allow this option. So the comment section for this post is free for all. There is only one rule to observe here: be civil…

Read more

2 years ago · 38 likes · 27 comments · Robert Wu

That’s why when I read this essay written by Mr. Shan Weijian, the legendary chairman of PAG, one of China’s most consequential private equity funds, what Mr. Shan said resonated so much with me.

Below is a translation of the article. The translation was made by DeepSeek and edited by myself. The emphasis and commentaries are my own.

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Seeking the shadow of the future from history

从历史中寻找未来的影子

By Shan Weijian

In recent years, the number of people visiting museums has been increasing, creating a "museum fever."

Several years ago, I visited the Shanghai Museum located in People's Square, and what impressed me the most was its automatic temperature control and sensor lighting system. As is well known, cultural relics such as silk, fabrics, and calligraphy are fragile, and temperature, humidity, and light can cause gradual cumulative damage. However, the calligraphy and painting display cabinets in the Shanghai Museum are equipped with constant temperature and humidity systems, and the lighting is moderate and sufficient but not intense. Interestingly, the lighting in the display cabinets is sensor-designed: when visitors approach, the lights automatically turn on; when visitors leave, the lights automatically turn off, minimizing the "exposure" time of the cultural relics. At that time, there were very few visitors, so I was able to observe the sensor design that turned on and off.

When I revisited the Shanghai Museum in 2023, I found that this sensor lighting system was almost ineffective. Why? Because there were so many visitors that almost every display cabinet was crowded at all times, and the lights had no chance to dim. This made me truly feel that the public's enthusiasm for museums has changed dramatically.

By 2024, it was even more remarkable. At the beginning of 2024, part of the new Shanghai Museum East Hall was opened, exhibiting cultural relics mainly composed of bronze ware. I tried to book tickets a few days in advance, only to find that they were already sold out. Due to my tight schedule, I couldn't wait, and finally, a colleague and I each spent 300 yuan to buy scalped tickets to get a glimpse.

The new hall is three times the size of the old one. Its director said on the website that the number of daily visitors will be controlled at 20,000 when all the exhibition halls are open. So, if it opens for 300 days a year, it can accommodate 6 million visitors annually. The British Museum in London, which is said to be the world's first museum, officially opened to the public in 1759, and its visitor count in 2023 was 5.8 million. It seems that the Shanghai Museum East Hall's visitor count in 2025 is expected to surpass that of the British Museum, which has a history of more than 260 years.

The richness of the Shanghai Museum's collection is probably second only to the National Museum in Beijing. Surprisingly, the Shanghai Museum's visitor count in 2023 did not even rank in the top 20 in China.

According to the "2023 Global Theme Park and Museum Report," the growth of museum visitor traffic in China is strong, with seven museums ranking in the global top 20, namely the National Museum, China Science and Technology Museum, Nanjing Museum, Suzhou Museum, Hunan Museum, Hubei Provincial Museum, and Guangdong Museum. The National Museum ranks third globally, with an annual visitor count of over 6.75 million, second only to the Louvre in Paris (8.8 million) and the Vatican Museums in Rome (6.76 million). The visitor counts of the other six Chinese museums in 2023 all exceeded 4 million. However, the National Museum's visitor count is not the highest in the country. The Palace Museum's number of visitors had already exceeded 19 million in 2019, and the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum Museum's visitor count in 2023 was 11 million, far exceeding that of the National Museum.

How popular are museums in China?

According to statistics, by the end of 2018, the annual visitor count of museums nationwide had exceeded 1 billion. Data from the National Cultural Heritage Administration shows that in 2023, museums in China received 1.29 billion visitors, a record high; the number of registered museums nationwide reached 6,833, with 268 new additions. During the Spring Festival in 2024 alone, museums nationwide received over 73.58 million visitors, a year-on-year increase of 98.6%. By summer, museum bookings had increased by more than 90% compared to the previous year, showing that they are becoming increasingly popular.

Not only in domestic museums, but Chinese visitors can also be seen everywhere in major famous museums around the world. I am a trustee of the British Museum, and a senior executive there told me that Chinese people have now become the main force among foreign visitors to the British Museum, and they are also the group that spends the most in the souvenir shops.

How did this museum fever arise?

I think there are two main reasons: first, people's living standards have improved, and cultural tourism, including museums, has become an important part of people's leisure life; second, Chinese people generally have an interest in history, and as carriers and evidence of history, the cultural relics exhibited in museums provide history enthusiasts with a valuable opportunity to face the past directly, feel the glory of history, and the wisdom of the ancients.

Imagine, after seeing the sword used by King Goujian of Yue in the Hubei Provincial Museum, will you immediately think of the story of "sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall" and the era of the Spring and Autumn Period when Wu and Yue competed for dominance? Standing in front of the Terracotta Warriors of the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum, will you be shocked by the majestic momentum of the Qin army's iron horses and golden spears, with bright armor, sweeping across the six states? After witnessing the authentic "Cold Food Observance" by Su Dongpo in the Taipei Palace Museum, will you sigh that "the writing reflects the person"...

When I saw the “Lai Pan逨盘” unearthed in 2003 in the Baoji Bronze Ware Museum, I was deeply shocked. The bottom of the pan is inscribed with 21 lines of 372 characters, recording the history of the Shan family's eight generations assisting the 12 emperors of the Western Zhou Dynasty. It not only confirms the records of the Zhou Dynasty's genealogy in historical books but also lets me know that the ancestors of the Shan surname had a significant background.

How much interest do Chinese people have in history? The sales of history books can give a glimpse.

Abroad, the regulars on the bestseller lists are mostly novels, and history books are almost never seen. In China, history-related books and audio content have repeatedly achieved excellent sales and playback results. In the past few years, a long-running audiobook I often listened to was "游学中华Studying China," hosted by the anchor, who gave a detailed reading of Lü Simian's "General History of China." The anchor cited extensively and meticulously, starting from prehistory. As of November 2024, he has updated more than 760 episodes, only reaching the Han Dynasty, and the playback count has already exceeded 36 million. Another audiobook, "Intensive Reading of Chinese History," has a playback count of over 200 million. These materials fully demonstrate the popularity of history books and related content in China, which is unimaginable in other countries.

Reading history, besides evoking nostalgia for the past, does it have practical significance? Absolutely. Emperor Taizong of Tang, Li Shimin, has a famous saying: "Using history as a mirror, one can know the rise and fall." To predict the future world structure, one can also find shadows from history.

Graham Allison, the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, published "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?" in 2017. This book made him famous. In the book, based on the records of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, Allison discusses the history of war between the rising Athens and the hegemonic city-state Sparta due to competition for dominance, combined with other historical cases of rise and fall, and draws a warning conclusion: when a rising power meets an existing great power, it is difficult for the two to avoid conflict due to power competition. This is what Allison calls the Thucydides Trap. He points out that in the process of China's rise, it may be difficult to avoid conflict with the current world hegemon, the United States.

Many in the West believe that the Thucydides Trap is a historical inevitability because the experience of Western history is like this. For example, Alexander the Great of ancient Greece and Julius Caesar of ancient Rome both conquered their known world, and Napoleon in modern times almost swallowed the entire European continent. The Western powers during the imperialist period extended the tentacles of colonial expansion to the world, placing most or even all of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania under their rule. The small island of Great Britain even once became the "empire on which the sun never sets," and its influence lasted until the end of World War II.

The United States, as a latecomer, although founded on democracy and freedom, its impulse to conquer and expand is in the same vein as the European powers. In 1776, the United States declared independence; in 1812, it invaded Canada and was defeated; in 1846, it invaded Mexico and annexed a large area of land, including what is now California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; in 1898, by launching the Spanish-American War, the United States took Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain; taking Hawaii was even easier, almost effortless, almost as easy as picking up something.

Since its founding, the United States has repeatedly interfered in the internal affairs of other countries and even overthrown their regimes to protect its own interests. The book "Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" published in 2006 details this history. Another book published in 2019, "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States," not only records the history of American expansion and colonization but also focuses on describing the American self-deception: unlike the old imperialist countries, the United States never calls the land it seizes colonies but coyly calls them "territories." The Philippines before independence, today's Puerto Rico, and Guam are all "territories" of the United States, in an awkward position of being neither part of its 50 states nor sovereign.

Judging others by oneself, it is no wonder that the United States is wary of any rising great power, fearing that it will follow its own practices and challenge its status as the world hegemon. [Robert: a lot of US fears about China is precisely because of projecting their own image unto China]

What is imperialism? The essence of imperialism is the conquest and subjugation of other peoples.

Starting from ancient Greece and Rome, Europe has a long history of imperialism. However, imperialism is not unique to Europe. In ancient times, there was the Islamic Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the vast Mongol Empire established by Genghis Khan that covered Eurasia. In modern times, there were the once mighty but short-lived German Empire and the "Great Japanese Empire." When strong, expand, conquer all directions, and enslave foreign peoples, this seems to be the inevitable fate of powerful countries. Of course, these empires have all vanished, and the only superpower today is the United States. Looking around the world, the only one that may challenge its hegemonic status is the rising China. This makes the United States uneasy.

So, is China's rise bound to lead to conflict with the United States?

China is the only superpower in world history that has never attempted to conquer and dominate the world. For more than 2,000 years, the Chinese nation has mostly been in a strong position but has not posed a major threat to its neighboring countries. The distance is not the reason, after all, Genghis Khan's army once swept across Eurasia, conquering vast lands including today's Russia and India; Zheng He's fleet also went to the Western Seas several times, reaching as far as Africa, but the purpose was not conquest or colonization.

Since Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BC, the major unified dynasties ruled by the Han people have not made external expansion a primary national policy. The Central Plains dynasties had the most frequent conflicts with the northern nomadic peoples, first the Xiongnu, then the Khitan, and were repeatedly attacked or even conquered by these grassland peoples—the Liao, Jin, and Yuan successively defeated the Song, and the Qing conquered the Ming. Therefore, the strategic focus of the Central Plains dynasties has always been defense, starting with Qin Shi Huang building the Great Wall, stretching for thousands of miles, which is a testament to this.

Historically, China's territory was the largest during two dynasties, the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, far exceeding the scope of the Qin, Han, Tang, and Song dynasties. Why is this? Because the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty and the Manchus of the Qing Dynasty incorporated the vast territories they conquered into China's territory. [Robert: more about it here]

The advantage of Han culture lies in its ability to assimilate. No foreign people entered the Central Plains without being assimilated by Han culture, and the so-called “expansion” of China's territory was gradually formed in the process of being invaded by the “foreigners” of the time and being to their possessions. This historical phenomenon is full of contrasts and contradictions. Of course, these once foreign peoples are now members of the big family of the Chinese nation, making China a multi-ethnic country.

In September 2024, on the 50th anniversary of the excavation of the Terracotta Warriors of the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum, I made a special trip to visit the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum Museum, the Shaanxi History Museum, and the Baoji Bronze Ware Museum, and also visited some excavated tombs. I was invited by Professor Chris Gosden of the Oxford University Institute of Archaeology. He and I are both trustees of the British Museum. In a casual conversation, he asked me: "Why does China have no history of colonialism?" The fact that he could ask this question shows his knowledge of Chinese history and the uniqueness of Chinese history.

The differences between Chinese and Western history can be seen in the collections of museums.

Whether it's the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States, the vast majority of the artifacts housed in these Western museums come from ancient and splendid civilizations around the world—Ancient Egypt, the Middle East's Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Ancient China—encompassing almost the essence of human civilization. It is undeniable that without a history of invasion, how could there be so many treasures?

In contrast, the collections in Chinese museums are exclusively historical relics of the Chinese nation. What China possesses are the treasures passed down by our ancestors.

The rise of China is an inevitability of history. In terms of purchasing power parity, China's economy surpassed that of the United States in 2017; even in nominal U.S. dollar terms, although there is still a gap between China and the U.S., China's population is four times that of the U.S., and its per capita GDP is currently only one-fifth of America's. Closing this gap is merely a matter of time.

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States in 1979, the two countries have experienced a honeymoon period. When China's economic strength was not yet a threat to America's dominance, the U.S. was more than willing to develop mutually beneficial economic relations with China. However, today, as China's economic scale is on the verge of catching up with but not yet surpassing the U.S., America has become highly anxious.

To maintain its global hegemony, the United States has frequently adopted containment policies, manifesting in trade wars, technology wars, and other sanctions. China's best strategic choice should be to focus on economic development at full speed to surpass the U.S. as quickly as possible. Once China's economic scale exceeds that of the U.S., containment will lose its meaning, and Sino-American relations may usher in a period of relaxation and improvement.

The United States, having been founded for less than 250 years, has almost never been far from war. Statistics show that there have been only 16 years in U.S. history when it was not involved in a conflict. The U.S. has over 800 military bases worldwide.

A study by Brown University reveals that since the "War on Terror" began in 2001, the U.S. has caused nearly one million deaths in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya. In recent years, U.S. foreign policy has led to and exacerbated the Russia-Ukraine conflict and instability in the Middle East. Many people worry: To maintain its global dominance, and as China seeks to rise, is a war between the two inevitable?

In my view, not necessarily. History has shown that the U.S. is quite restrained when it comes to wars it believes it cannot win.

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, both sides possessed nuclear weapons capable of destroying each other, which prevented direct military conflict. Even today, while the U.S. is pouring resources into supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons, willing to fight until the last Ukrainian, it has no intention of sending its own troops, avoiding direct conflict with Russia. This is partly due to the deterrent power of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

Direct military confrontation between China and the U.S. has only occurred during the Korean War. In 1950, before China sent troops, Premier Zhou Enlai conveyed a message through the Indian ambassador to China, warning that if American forces crossed the "38th Parallel," China would not stand idly by. The U.S. ignored this warning and even pushed the war to the Yalu River, only to be driven back to the 38th Parallel by Chinese forces. During the Vietnam War, Premier Zhou Enlai again warned the U.S. not to cross the 17th Parallel, or China would intervene. As a result, the U.S. never crossed that line. Thus, while the U.S. believes in military power, it exercises restraint in the face of formidable opponents.

Over 2,000 years ago, Chinese sages warned: "A state, no matter how large, will perish if it is warlike; the world, no matter how peaceful, will be in danger if it forgets the threat of war.国虽大，好战必亡；天下虽安，忘战必危。" Studying Chinese history teaches us that China's rise is not a threat to world peace. However, Western history reminds us that during China's rise, forgetting the threat of war is perilous. The greatest guarantee of China's and the world's security is China's relentless focus on economic development and rapid strengthening of its own capabilities. Only when China's economic scale surpasses that of the U.S. can the world truly welcome peace and stability.

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